#125 13 Nov 2001

USAF COUNTERPROLIFERATION CENTER CPC OUTREACH JOURNAL Air University Air War College Maxwell AFB, Alabama Welcome to the CPC Outreach Journal. As part of USAF Counterproliferation Center’s mission to counter weapons of mass destruction through education and research, we’re providing our government and civilian community a source for timely counterproliferation information. This information includes articles, papers and other documents addressing issues pertinent to US military response options for dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical threats and attacks. It’s our hope this information resource will help enhance your counterproliferation issue awareness.

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CONTENTS

Decades-old smallpox vaccinations may still protect U.S.: No firm data on nuclear threat Prince: Saudis Monitored Weapon Claims Nuclear attack: Now anything seems possible Interview with Ambassador Robert G. Joseph Russia Slams U.S. on Chemical Weapons Plant Delay More anthrax found on Hill U.S. Hits Suspected Weapons Sites Chemical attacks foiled, Europeans say Small firms respond to government's plea for anti-terror tech Toxic Chemicals' Security Worries Officials Rumsfeld Seeks Consolidation Of DoD Agencies Wishing Upon A Star Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons Terrorists Courted Nuclear Scientists Lax Nuclear Security In Russia Is Cited As Way For Bin Laden To Get Arms U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting Officials Hope Russia Will Accede On Missile Defense Senior Russian Official Reveals Nuclear Material Theft Attempt Washington Whispers Anthrax Vaccine Manufacturer Faces FDA, Veterans' Scrutiny Al Qaeda Sites Point To Tests Of Chemicals Nuclear Threat Is Real, Experts Warn State Dept. Mail Bldg. Has Anthrax Bush Promises Warheads Reduction

11/08/2001 - Updated 11:55 AM ET Decades-old smallpox vaccinations may still protect By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY While many Americans worry that bioterrorists will strike with smallpox before the USA has enough vaccine, studies suggest that people immunized 50 years ago or more still have some protection. Researchers also say mass immunization probably wouldn't be necessary because smallpox is not as contagious as other bugs such as measles or the flu. "It's not going to be the Armageddon that some would have you believe," says smallpox expert James LeDuc of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In some countries, smallpox was eradicated after less than two-thirds of people were immunized, LeDuc says. http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/08/smallpox-usat.htm

U.S.: No firm data on nuclear threat By John Diamond and Bob Kemper Washington Bureau Published November 8, 2001

WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence has concerns about Osama bin Laden acquiring nuclear weapons or radioactive material that could be turned into a weapon, but they have no concrete evidence he has done so, officials said Wednesday.

President Bush's decision a day earlier to highlight the concern in a speech from Washington sent via satellite to European leaders caught intelligence and defense officials by surprise.

These officials, in congressional testimony and internal reports, have spoken frequently of bin Laden's efforts to develop chemical and biological weaponry, but they have mentioned the nuclear issue only in passing as a relatively remote possibility. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that the Bush administration says were masterminded by bin Laden, no new intelligence has come in pointing to the exiled Saudi millionaire actually acquiring a nuclear weapon.

More likely, officials say, would be a conventional explosive packed with radioactive material that is much easier to obtain than weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.

"The general view is that he's looking for nuclear material, and even nuclear weapons if possible, and has made attempts to get it," said one U.S. official familiar with intelligence on bin Laden. "There is no good information on his actually possessing it, at least at the levels of intelligence that I see."

Public statement revealing

An examination of 15 public statements by CIA Director George Tenet and top lieutenants going back to 1997 that mentioned bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction turns up only occasional reference to the nuclear threat.

Most frequently, these officials point to bin Laden's efforts to develop chemical or biological weapons, concerns based on solid intelligence, including spy satellite images showing dead animals at one of bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Officials suspect the animals were killed in weapons experiments.

Bush aides acknowledged the president was basing his statements not on new intelligence but on bin Laden's stated intentions and a variety of indicators, from media reporting to testimony in recent terrorism trials.

"The president said it because he thought it was important that the American people, and people around the world, know that these are the types of people we are dealing with when dealing with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

The aim, terrorism experts said, was not to alert Americans to a new and imminent threat but to keep up the pressure on allies to maintain their support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

"It's aimed at the public here and the leadership abroad, to reinforce the coalition and to keep spirits from flagging by pointing out the stakes," said Gideon Rose, a terrorism expert with the Council on Foreign Relations. "They are trying to present it as a generalized threat rather than as a specific threat."

Nuclear-laced bomb possible

A radiation bomb, as opposed to a full-blown nuclear weapon, would use a conventional explosive to spray an area with radioactive material. Such material is available at 10,000 locations throughout the world, including nuclear plants, laboratories, medical facilities and universities. Cesium, iodine, strontium as well as waste uranium or waste plutonium from a nuclear plant could be used.

Such weapons, known as radiation-dispersal devices, have not been used by terrorists but could be relatively easy to assemble.

Two key factors, more than any specific intelligence, weigh in the administration's thinking about the threat posed by bin Laden. First, he has referred publicly, in news media interviews and in his declarations, to "the nuclear bomb of Islam" and the religious duty of Muslims to acquire as much destructive force as possible for the war against infidels. Second, whether by actually planning the Sept. 11 attacks or by his public statements lauding them, bin Laden has demonstrated a willingness to use massive force against civilians.

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said bin Laden has "already crossed the weapons of mass destruction threshold."

Events raise suspicions

Recent events that have raised suspicions of bin Laden's interest in acquiring nuclear capability include:

- Pakistan, which has successfully tested a nuclear weapon, detained three nuclear scientists after Washington expressed concerns that Pakistani nuclear engineers sympathetic to bin Laden's militant Islamic message might be providing Al Qaeda with information or material. One of those arrested, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, is a fundamentalist Muslim sympathetic to Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which has sheltered bin Laden.

Bin Laden operatives are thought to have tried, so far without success, to buy nuclear weapons-related components in former Soviet republics, the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, Bulgaria and South Africa.

In a trial this year of suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Jamal Ahmed Al- Fadl testified that in 1993 and 1994 he helped Al Qaeda in an unsuccessful bid to obtain enriched uranium from Sudan.

Pakistani officials have warned of the danger of an Islamic uprising in Pakistan that could topple the government and put nuclear weapons in the hands of militant Muslims.

Stephen J. Hedges of the Tribune's Washington Bureau contributed to this report. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0111080254nov08.story?coll=chi%2Dprintnews%2Dhed

Thursday November 8 4:19 PM ET Prince: Saudis Monitored Weapon Claims By SUSAN SEVAREID, Associated Press Writer MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) - Saudi intelligence heard reports, but never had evidence, that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) may have acquired weapons of mass destruction, the kingdom's former intelligence chief said in remarks published Thursday. Prince Turki, head of the Saudi secret service from 1977 until last August, ruled out the possibility bin Laden's al- Qaida organization might have amassed such weapons, according to the English-language Arab News. ``We monitored all these claims - not only those related to al-Qaida, but regarding other organizations as well,'' Prince Turki was quoted as saying. ``There were reports that several individuals and organizations had acquired or (were) about to acquire such weapons, but we have not received strong evidence to back that up.'' Bin Laden, who is bitterly critical of the Saudi royal family, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and disowned by his family in the early 1990s. He is the main suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States. Prince Turki's comments came in an unusual in-depth interview conducted last week with two Saudi-based media, the Arab News and MBC television. The newspaper has been publishing a series of articles this week based on the interview. What sort of weapons the prince referred to wasn't clear. However, President Bush (news - web sites) said this week that bin Laden is trying to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. U.S. officials say they believe bin Laden's al-Qaida network has access to crude chemical weapons such as chlorine and phosgene poison gases, but not more complex weapons such as Sarin nerve gas. They say evidence exists al- Qaida sought nuclear material. Witnesses in the New York trial of suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania testified bin Laden had sent people to Sudan to buy uranium. The trial transcript is unclear on whether the purchase was made. Counter-terrorism officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press in Amman, Jordan, on Thursday that they were reviewing reports that bin Laden agents tried to acquire non-conventional weapons from sources in former Soviet republics. But the officials said they had no confirmation that bin Laden had managed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Jean Pascal Zanders of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said it took Iraq, with the advantages of state support, 10 to 15 years to mass produce biological and chemical agents. Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki said in the Arab News interview, also monitored bin Laden's efforts to build Islamic militias in Sudan in the mid-1990s. The prince said Saudi intelligence monitored bin Laden ``recruiting persons from different parts of the Islamic world, from Algeria to Egypt, from East Asia to Somalia, to get them trained at these camps.'' Bin Laden left Sudan in 1996. He returned to Afghanistan (news - web sites), where he was welcomed because of his years there battling Soviet forces in the 1980s. Prince Turki also was quoted as saying Saudi intelligence estimated bin Laden's wealth at between ``$40 million and $50 million at most.'' Other estimates have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011108/wl/attacks_saudi_bin_laden_1.html

Nuclear attack: Now anything seems possible November 9, 2001 Posted: 4:50 AM EST (0950 GMT) By Jamie Allen CNN (CNN) -- Not since the height of the Cold War have Americans seriously considered they could come under nuclear attack. But when President Bush said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network is likely seeking weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs, the possibility that the unthinkable could happen suddenly seemed less remote. How plausible is that threat? Right now, that's all it appears to be -- a threat. Terrorists might want nuclear weapons, but no credible evidence has emerged to suggest that any terrorist group possesses such weapons, according to the latest intelligence made public. Still, post-September 11, the potential can't be dismissed. At an October 30 press conference in Vienna, Austria, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, identified a shifting of strategy in the "fight against terrorism." "The willingness of terrorists to sacrifice their lives to achieve their evil aims creates a new dimension in the fight against terrorism," ElBaradei said. "We are not just dealing with the possibility of governments diverting nuclear materials into clandestine weapons programs," he said. "Now we have been alerted to the potential of terrorists targeting nuclear facilities or using radioactive sources to incite panic, contaminate property, and even cause injury or death among civilian populations."

Nuclear attack scenarios Imagined scenarios of nuclear attacks by terrorists generally fall into two categories. One: Terrorists unleash a nuclear or "dirty bomb," a conventional bomb loaded with radioactive junk. Two: They ram the United States' own nuclear facilities with a hijacked jetliner or truck bomb, causing toxic chemicals to disperse into the air. One source of fears is the former Soviet Union. When it collapsed, some of its nuclear weapons -- including those that apparently could be carried in a suitcase or briefcase -- went unaccounted for in subsequent inventories, according to Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, an independent military research organization. Gen. Alexander Lebed, the Russian national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, completed an inventory that "came up short by something between 50 and 100 suitcases," Blair said. "No one has really, persuasively explained the discrepancy between Lebed's count and what the Russian government said, which was, 'Don't worry, nothing's missing.'" John Lepingwell, a nuclear expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, doesn't give any credence to a suitcase-bomb threat. "There is no good evidence that any rebel group or terrorist has these," he told Time magazine. Lepingwell also dismissed the possibility of terrorists building or getting their hands on a nuclear bomb and setting it off in the United States. "This threat is quite unlikely," he said. Terrorists, he said, would have to surmount serious obstacles to carry off a nuclear- related attack. Among them: -- Obtaining plutonium or highly-enriched uranium, the fissionable material of nuclear bombs. They'd have to buy it, steal it or produce it, and each case poses its own difficulties. -- Building a bomb. "While creating a design may be possible, turning a design into a functioning weapon is not easy and would require time and substantial effort," Lepingwell said. -- Delivering the bomb. "They would have to get it to the U.S. from wherever they built it," Lepingwell said. "Sending it airfreight or by sea would take time, and would require a string of contacts and checks that might be detected by intelligence agencies." And the dirty bombs? The Center for Defense Information's Blair seems to think it's possible. He recalled how, in 1995, Chechen separatists put a canister in a Moscow park containing a highly radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission. It was a stunt, performed apparently to show how vulnerable Moscow was, Blair said. The United States, said Blair, is just as vulnerable. "So with a dirty bomb, which could be a relatively small canister of nuclear waste that's exploded with dynamite in a city, the major problem probably would be the widespread evacuation and panic that would ensue," he said.

Nuclear powers Another source of concern: so-called rogue nations could supply terrorists with nuclear weapons. Former United Nations chief weapons inspector Richard Butler and his team went into Iraq to shut down Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb at the dawn of the Persian Gulf war. Just in time, he said. "I know with utter certainty that Iraq was months away from having nuclear weapons when we stopped them in 1990-'91," Butler said. "One of the key defectors from Iraq to the West, a man who was in charge of elements of Saddam Hussein's bomb program, actually said that he's already made one -- that Saddam has already put together a crude nuclear weapon." But even if Hussein has a crude bomb, that doesn't guarantee he'd be willing to hand it over to terrorists; or, as Lepingwell noted, that terrorists would be able to transport it undetected to their desired location. Another country watched closely by U.S. officials is the nuclear power Pakistan, according to Joseph Cirincione, nonproliferation project director for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonprofit organization that promotes U.S. interests in international relations. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has let U.S.-led forces use bases in Pakistan in support of the war on terrorists in Afghanistan. Cirincione fears backlash in Pakistan against the Musharraf government and the United States could lead to a coup by Muslim extremists sympathetic with the Taliban; if they succeeded in overthrowing Musharraf's government, that would put nuclear weapons in their hands. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, however, said that's not happening any time soon. "If the state begins to unravel, it'll have to unravel very fundamentally before that becomes a reality," she said. "And I don't see that sort of nightmare scenario."

Attacking nuclear facilities If nuclear weapons cannot be built or found, U.S. homeland security officials acknowledge terrorists could possibly attack U.S. nuclear plants using a hijacked plane or a large truck bomb. "This is far more likely, although the consequences are likely to be far lower," said Lepingwell, who said that an attack on a nuclear facility does not guarantee a meltdown -- the perceived goal of such an effort. "The terror dimension may turn out to be greater than the actual destruction in such a case." Victor Dricks, spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said steps have been taken since September 11 to increase security around nuclear facilities. The facilities are on "highest alert," he said. "In addition, we've issued more than half a dozen advisories in the last six weeks suggesting additional steps they could take to further increase security," Dricks said. "We also have sent letters to the governors of 40 states urging them to establish channels of communication with National Guard units in the event they feel the need to call upon them for assistance. "And our emergency operation center has been manned around-the-clock for the past six weeks by people who remain in constant communication with law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, state and local governments and the military," he said. Not enough, said Paul Leventhal, a critic of nuclear proliferation who worked on Senate legislation to establish the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1974 and now serves as president of the Nuclear Control Institute. He believes more needs to be done to protect nuclear facilities, including National Guard troops guarding every plant. Leventhal also recommends installing "anti-aircraft weapons like surface-to-air missile batteries" that could intercept a hijacked plane about to crash into a plant. September 11 was "a wakeup call and let's just hope it's not too late," Leventhal said. "It's been very frustrating getting politicians and the public to pay attention to the dangers of nuclear proliferation." Ultimately, the attacks of September 11 that shook the United States awoke Americans to grave possibilities. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said no matter how minuscule the chance of nuclear attack, there's work to be done. "I don't think it is likely to happen, but if the odds against that were 1,000-to-one, we want to make them 10,000-to- one," he told CNN. "If they are 10,000-to-one against it happening we want to make it a million-to-one." CNN National Security Correspondent David Ensor contributed to this report. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/11/08/rec.nuclear.attack/index.html

(Editor’s Note: Article below is long, please see hyperlink for remainder of article.) The Nonproliferation Review Fall-Winter 2001, Volume 8 • Number 3 Special Section on the September 11, 2001, Attacks Interview with Ambassador Robert G. Joseph conducted by Leonard S. Spector BACKGROUND

Ambassador Robert G. Joseph is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Proliferation Strategies, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense, U.S. National Security Council Staff. He is recognized as a leading member of the group of Republican defense strategists whose writings helped to shape the national security outlook of candidate George W. Bush. Since joining the Bush administration, Ambassador Joseph has played a key role on such issues as developing a new strategic framework with Russia and improving coordination of U.S. counterproliferation initiatives.

Prior to joining the National Security Council (NSC) staff, Dr. Joseph served as a Professor of National Security Studies and Director of the Center for Counterproliferation Research at the National Defense University. In the previous Bush administration, he held the positions of U.S. Commissioner to the Standing Consultative Commission on the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and Ambassador to the U.S.-Russian Consultative Commission on Nuclear Testing. In the Reagan administration, he held several positions within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy.

The interview was conducted on October 15, 2001, by Leonard S. Spector, Deputy Director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Editor-in- Chief of the Center's publications. ORGANIZATION OF NSC STAFF NPR: Thank you for agreeing to this interview with The Nonproliferation Review. Let me begin by saying that my colleagues at the Monterey Institute and I recognize the great effort the administration is making to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11. We all share your hopes for success. I'd like to begin by asking you to comment on the new title that was given to your position when you joined the NSC staff. Formerly the position was "Senior Director for Nonproliferation." It is now called "Senior Director for Proliferation Strategies, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense." Why did you make these changes? Joseph: Thank you for your words of support. As for the change in title, the Bush administration is strongly committed to reducing the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD). We believe this requires a multifaceted approach that combines traditional nonproliferation policies and programs—national, bilateral, and multinational—along with more active measures to deter and defend against existing and expanding threats posed by WMD and their delivery systems. "Counterproliferation" refers to those policies and programs needed to counter a wide spectrum of threats to the United States and to protect against the consequences of proliferation. We wanted to consolidate all of these under one Senior Director at the NSC to enhance coordination and heighten the visibility of these combined activities.[1] NPR: What is the scope of your responsibilities regarding "homeland defense?" Joseph: In the context of this directorate, homeland defense is limited to defense against state threats, not terrorist threats. Most of that segment of the directorate's portfolio has to date been devoted to missile defense issues, including the ABM Treaty. DETERRENCE NPR: To clarify the point you mentioned, you have spoken about "deterring" proliferation threats. Is part of that portfolio trying to ensure the adequacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile? Joseph: No, the stockpile is not one of this office's responsibilities. This office, however, does have a role in shaping the administration's deterrence policy. I would refer you to the May 1st speech [at the National Defense University (NDU)] in which the president emphasized the requirement for a comprehensive strategy to deal with the proliferation threat, the threat of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. This speech reflected in many ways the responsibilities of this directorate, because the comprehensive strategy is based on three principal components: strengthening nonproliferation (and we certainly want to lead in that effort); effective counterproliferation (for the first time counterproliferation is being done at the national level here at the NSC); and a new deterrence concept to address today's threats. The new deterrence concept is based less on offensive nuclear capabilities and more on defensive capabilities, particularly the ability to defend against limited missile threats. ... http://www.cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol08/83/jos83.htm

Russia Slams U.S. on Chemical Weapons Plant Delay By Jon Boyle MOSCOW (Reuters) - The head of Russia's Munitions Agency has angrily accused Pentagon and State Department officials of delaying building work on a factory intended to destroy thousands of tons of Soviet-era chemical weapons. Zinovy Pak told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday the Pentagon's refusal to release promised funds could force him to halt Russia's program to neutralize the toxic agents. The row could further delay a program already well behind schedule. Moscow missed earlier deadlines to cut its 44,000 ton stockpile, and is certain to miss the 2007 completion date set out in the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. The row erupted on the eve of Russian President Vladimir Putin's summit in the United States, where he is to discuss arms control with President Bush. And it comes barely three weeks after the two leaders vowed to do all they could to prevent the spread of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. The issue is even more topical given the rash of anthrax attacks in the United States. "Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the State Department are holding up decisions on the start of building work, for incomprehensible and unjustified reasons," said Pak, his huge hands tapping out his frustration on the table. "Firstly, the United States is not giving the money, and secondly it is not giving the go-ahead for construction work to begin...I speak so harshly because I've just had a meeting with representatives of the United States." The U.S. embassy was not immediately available for comment. FUNDING DEAL Under agreements signed in 1992 and 1996, the United States agreed to fund construction of a giant chemical weapons destruction plant at Shchuchye in western Siberia, where some 32,000 tons of organo-phosphate weapons are to be neutralized. The U.S. Congress last year cut off funding because of Russia's failure to put in its own cash. But after intense lobbying by Pak on Capitol Hill, it was restored. Pak said Russia had "fulfilled and even exceeded" U.S. spending targets, setting aside $25 million for the Shchuchye plant this year, a sum he said would be almost doubled in 2002. "Russia has fully met (U.S. demands) and more. But unfortunately bureaucrats, first at the State Department and then the Pentagon, started thinking up new reasons for not starting to fulfil their obligations. "The reasons they give are artificial...It's a game by bureaucrats who don't want there to be normal relations of partnership between Russia and the United States." So far Russia has built housing and installed roads, water, gas and electricity. But a Reuters journalist who visited the site in June saw no construction apart from so far was a row of toilets -- presumably for the contractors. "I am greatly concerned, because I just don't understand whether the United States will take part." Pak said he hoped Putin and Bush would discuss the matter at Bush's ranch in Texas, and that if Washington did not alter its stance by year-end, Russia might review the program. "Then we will tell the whole world that the United States didn't want to help Russia. They don't seem worried that Russia will retain a considerable amount of chemical weapons. But I don't think that will increase their security," Pak added. SECURITY CONCERNS Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, security has been increased almost daily at the seven Russian sites which store the deadly toxins, Pak said. "We are doing everything so that not a single terrorist or anyone else will get their hands on even a gram of chemical weapons. But we can only give a guarantee when we have destroyed everything. Because with terrorism, theft is an art form." Overall, Moscow says it needs $4 billion to destroy its chemical weapons stocks, although another dispute is brewing between Russia and Western states about when a chemical weapon can be considered destroyed. Pak says once the active nerve agent is neutralized it can no longer be considered a weapon. Washington says the by-product should also be destroyed. Pak said the wording of the Chemical Weapons Convention was unclear on the issue. A special session of the executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, is to meet in The Hague on Tuesday to debate that very topic. http://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20011109_137.html

11/13/2001 - Updated 11:37 AM ET More anthrax found on Hill WASHINGTON (AP) — Trace amounts of anthrax have been discovered in the office of Sen. Dick Lugar, making him the ninth senator to learn in recent days that his office was contaminated. All nine offices are in the building where an anthrax-filled letter was opened Oct. 15. Lugar, R-Ind., was told Sunday night that a minute trace of anthrax was found in his office in the Hart Senate building, but that it posed no health risk, Lugar's office said Monday. http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/12/anthrax-hill.htm

Monday November 12 6:58 AM ET U.S. Hits Suspected Weapons Sites By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) probably does not have a nuclear weapon, but likely has chemical or biological weapons, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said. U.S. forces have bombed some sites in Afghanistan (news - web sites) that could have been involved in producing such weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said Sunday. Some of them have been bombed, some of them have not and others have not been found, he said. ``If we had good information on a chemical or biological development area, we would do something about it,'' Rumsfeld said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.'' ``It is not an easy thing to do. We have every desire in the world to prevent the terrorists from using these capabilities.'' Getting information that a site may be producing weapons of mass destruction ``faces you with a situation, are you best taking it out or are you best learning more about it,'' Rumsfeld said earlier on ``Fox News Sunday.'' The New York Times reported Sunday that the United States had identified three possible chemical or biological weapons sites in Afghanistan used by al-Qaida, and had avoided bombing them. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials said they doubt bin Laden's claim that his al-Qaida network has a nuclear weapon. ``I think it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon, but on the other hand, with the determination they have, they may very well,'' Rumsfeld said on CBS. The defense secretary and other officials said they were worried, that al-Qaida network could have weapons of mass destruction that possibly include radiological weapons - mixtures of conventional explosives and nuclear material designed to spread radiation without a nuclear detonation. ``We have every intelligence operation practically in the world on the problem of al-Qaida and the Taliban and their weapons of mass destruction at this point,'' the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), said on ABC's ``This Week.'' President Bush (news - web sites) has said the anti-Taliban northern alliance should not take over the Afghan capital of Kabul, preferring to wait until a broad-based, post-Taliban government can be formed. Rumsfeld said that was important to encourage anti-Taliban resistance by some tribes of the Taliban's Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan's south. The northern alliance is largely made up of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, not Afghanistan's main Pashtun ethnic group. ``We need them to oppose the Taliban, so they will have a voice in post-Taliban business,'' Rumsfeld said. An official with the northern alliance said Sunday that ``it would be ideal'' if a broad coalition of all ethnic groups could come together before Kabul is taken. Abdullah, the opposition's foreign minister, said the alliance already includes some Pashtun forces. The United States has had difficulty recruiting anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan's south. The Taliban captured and executed opposition Pashtun figure Abdul Haq last month, for example. Besides, Rumsfeld said, ``Kabul is not the military prize of prizes.'' The Taliban's capital is in the southern city of Kandahar, and Kabul has been so devastated by two decades of war that its 1 million people will need immediate humanitarian aid when the city changes hands, Rumsfeld said. ``The real prize of prizes is the Taliban leadership and the al-Qaida leadership and the al-Qaida fighting forces and the Taliban fighting forces,'' Rumsfeld said. ``And they are not, for the most part, in Kabul.'' Rumsfeld and Rice echoed comments by Bush, who has said he believes al-Qaida would use any chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons it has. ``They are not worried about loss of life,'' Rumsfeld said. He said that even if al-Qaida has biological or chemical agents, it may lack the expertise to use them. U.S. officials have said they believe al-Qaida has access to crude chemical weapons such as chlorine and phosgene poison gases, but not more complex weapons such as sarin. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011112/us/attacks_military_157.html

Chemical attacks foiled, Europeans say 11/12/01 Craig Pyes and William C. Rempel Los Angeles Times Spiez, Switzerland - As the United States focuses on Osama bin Laden's suspected efforts to obtain chemical weapons, European authorities say they have uncovered evidence of plans for chemical attacks by North African terror groups loosely affiliated with bin Laden's al-Qaida organization. Officials say the groups are trained by al-Qaida and are tied to terrorists involved in the foiled 1999 Los Angeles International Airport bomb plot and other conspiracies from Canada to Eastern Europe. One plan to test a poison gas weapon in France was disrupted by European intelligence agents in March, officials said. The foiled test was an apparent prelude to unspecified future attacks. The terrorists wanted to try out what they called "the product" - a vapor that suffocates victims when inhaled. Authorities believe the product was hydrogen cyanide, a potentially lethal substance commonly used in metallurgy and gas chambers. In a conversation secretly tape-recorded by Italian counterterror investigators, one of the plotters declared: "We have to be like snakes. We have to strike and then hide." The men went on to "set up a veritable terrorist brigade," according to a confidential Italian report on the case. While being monitored by authorities in Milan, the operatives "were training in the use of explosives and chemical agents [for] use in future attacks planned by the fundamentalist terrorist network," the report said. Three months earlier, German police seized explosives material and a formula for making "toxic substances in lethal doses" in a raid on terrorist residences of a related group in Frankfurt. That group was accused of conspiring to bomb a crowded Christmas market last year with explosives packed with nails. But authorities said they believed the predominantly Algerian terror cell was contemplating using chemical weapons in subsequent plots. Counterterrorism officials still believe that if al-Qaida and its related groups possess chemical weapons, the devices likely would be crude and the delivery system reliant upon individual terrorists, including suicide bombers. Furthermore, cyanide gases are only dangerous in high concentrations that are difficult to attain in open areas. Still, an official at a Swiss military laboratory in Spiez acknowledged "there are lots of possibilities" for terrorist use of chemical weapons - including nerve agents and cyanide. http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/1005561026765 895.xml

Posted at 12:04 a.m. PST Monday, Nov. 12, 2001 Small firms respond to government's plea for anti-terror tech BY STEVE JOHNSON Mercury News Long before Sept. 11, small companies here and across the nation were at work on a remarkable array of gadgets and strategies to counter terrorists. Some have been trying to develop electromagnetic beams or ``sonic fields'' for neutralizing toxic chemicals, blast- proof fabrics to wrap around buildings and orbiting radar for detecting ships carrying weapons of mass destruction. Others have been seeking ways to spot bombs in luggage, improve gas masks, predict terrorist behavior and protect commercial airplanes from attacks with lasers or electronic jamming devices. Once these companies had a hard time generating much interest in their ideas, even though many of them had gotten Pentagon start-up money. But no more. Last month, the military issued a nationwide appeal to businesses and others for solutions to combat terrorism. And entrepreneurs are hoping many more government contracts will be coming their way. ``It takes a 9-11 event to suddenly change the way people are thinking,'' said Bob Fields, whose Menlo Park company, Instant Genetics, has developed a device for quickly detecting anthrax and other toxic agents. ``Nobody thought anything like this could happen. And it did.'' Given the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and subsequent anthrax cases, military officials believe business could offer considerable help in dealing with the threat. ``There are a lot of people out there with good ideas that we'd like to capitalize on,'' Defense Department spokesman Maj. Mike Halbig said. And many of them aren't shy about offering their services. As of Nov. 1, more than 4,000 proposals had been submitted, Halbig said, noting that the response ``has been much higher than expected.'' None of those ideas has been made public. But previous contract awards, which can be found on the Defense Department's Web pages, reveal much about how the military views the threat. One big area of concern has involved detecting and neutralizing terrorist weapons. Alameda Applied Sciences of San Leandro got a $100,000 contract last year to begin work on a high-powered electromagnetic beam, which it promised can ``totally convert hazardous biological components into non-toxic materials like water.'' The company's concept is to first coat a contaminated area with a special polymer and then blast it with an electron beam, creating a substance that kills the bacteria, according to its president, Mahadevan Krishnan. He said initial research shows the beam would be particularly useful against anthrax and he hopes to get more Pentagon money to continue his work. Scientific Applications & Research Associates of Huntington Beach has suggested using high-frequency ``sonic fields'' to make clouds of toxic chemicals grow heavy and ``rapidly settle from the air to the ground.'' Another idea has been pursued by Nanomaterials Research of Colorado. It would use ``nanopowders'' -- microscopic particles, such as iron oxide -- which would bind to the chemical and nullify its toxic properties. Meanwhile, a Massachusetts firm -- Alphatech -- wants to keep terrorists from sneaking toxics into this country in the first place. It has studied the feasibility of using satellites equipped with special radar that could detect the suspicious movements of ships carrying weapons of mass destruction. To shield buildings from terrorist bombs, some firms have designed lightweight blastproof barriers. Aptek of Colorado, on the other hand, favors wrapping vulnerable columns and beams with super-strong composite fabrics, something like a bulletproof vest. Protecting commercial airplanes is another problem. Some companies have tried to find ways of preventing pilots from being blinded by terrorist lasers. Toyon Research of Goleta also is trying to keep terrorists from using electronic jamming devices to disrupt airplane functions. It has proposed equipping planes with special gear to detect and block such jamming signals. Figuring out what makes terrorists tick has been another active area of research. Synergia LLC of Redwood City, for example, got a contract two years ago to do ``computational psycho-social models'' of terrorists. Michael Fehling, a partner at the firm, declined to discuss the project, saying, ``I don't want a bull's-eye on my head.'' But a Pentagon summary said the company intended to assess how terrorists ``see the world, predict what they are disposed to do, assess our weaknesses and identify their vulnerabilities.'' In the past, getting the military excited about such projects was tough. Just ask Fields, who founded Instant Genetics five years ago, hoping to market a variety of devices for purifying and gathering data on genetic material. He managed to persuade the Army to give him $70,000 in December 1999 for initial work on a speedy, portable, easy-to-use device for detecting biological warfare agents. And after he built it, Fields said, the Army seemed eager at first to give him more money to refine it. But when he sought that financing last year, ``they would hardly return my calls.'' Eventually, Fields got through to the military brass and the news wasn't good. ``What we were told,'' he said, ``is that some other project had siphoned off all the available money.'' Even when companies did get additional financing, the process often seemed to take forever. The system's built-in checks and balances ``are like road bumps,'' said Tapesh Yadav, of NanoEnergy in Colorado, which became so frustrated with government work that it no longer accepts it. ``You essentially slow the whole process down.'' Changing that won't be easy. But with the Pentagon's new push to counter terrorism, many entrepreneurs are suddenly optimistic about doing business with it. ``A lot of people do kind of think this is going to be a gravy train and they're going to be able to cash in,'' said Joseph Miranda, of Hexagon Interactive in Los Angeles, which is trying to develop a computer program for predicting terrorist acts. ``It sounds cynical, but this is an opportunity for people,'' he added. ``There is a lot of expertise out there, a lot of innovative approaches. And this is a chance to get in and show it.'' http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/countr111201.htm

Toxic Chemicals' Security Worries Officials Widespread Use of Industrial Materials Makes Them Potential Target of Terrorists By Eric Pianin Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 12, 2001; Page A14 Last February, environmentalists concerned about security problems in the chemical industry made their point by scaling the fence of a large Dow Chemical plant near Baton Rouge, La., and gaining access to the control panel that regulates potentially dangerous discharges into the Mississippi River. The plant manufactures and stores large quantities of chlorine, a highly toxic chemical that could kill many if released as a gas through an explosion or fire. The Greenpeace activists who organized the foray said it was a snap because there were no guards or security cameras along the plant's lengthy perimeter and because the door to the wastewater discharge control room was unlocked. Though some industry officials played down the raid's significance, experts say it underscores another serious homeland security vulnerability after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Industry and government officials alike are looking for ways to make sure that, like commercial airliners, another component of U.S. technology isn't turned into a horrific weapon against Americans. "No one needed to convince us that we could be -- and indeed would be -- a target at some future date," said Frederick L. Webber, president of the American Chemistry Council, an industry group representing 180 major companies including DuPont, Dow, and BP Chemical. "If they're looking for the big bang, obviously you don't have to go far in your imagination to think about what the possibilities are." Industrial chemicals such as chlorine, sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid potentially provide terrorists with "effective and readily accessible materials to develop improvised explosives, incendiaries and poisons," according to a 1999 study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Yet the report, which focused on West Virginia and Nevada as a way to sample the situation nationwide, found that security at chemical plants "ranged from fair to very poor." "Most of the security gaps were the result of complacency and lack of awareness of the threat," the report stated. "Chemical plant security managers were very pessimistic about their ability to deter sabotage by employees." Some of the chemicals used or produced in plants throughout the country -- and transported by rail through densely populated areas including Baltimore and Washington -- have the potential to match or exceed the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, in which a methyl isocyanate gas leak at a Union Carbide Corp. pesticide plant killed at least 2,000 people and injured tens of thousands. "I think that if one had to think about what is the next level of potential targets, you would have to think about major chemical and oil facilities," said Fred Millar, a consultant on chemical accident prevention. Immediately after the United States began bombing Afghanistan on Oct. 7, the railroad industry took the precaution of imposing a 72-hour moratorium on carrying toxic or dangerous chemicals. But the shipments were resumed after the chemical industry argued that chlorine was essential to the continued operations of sewage treatment plants and that there was no evidence the shipments were being targeted by terrorists. Chemical industry officials say that, long before Sept. 11, plants had begun to tighten security and put in place safeguards including well trained and equipped hazardous materials response crews, vapor suppression equipment and barriers around chemical storage tanks. Since the attacks, the industry has issued tough new site security guidelines, and officials say they are in daily contact with the FBI and other federal authorities to prepare for a direct threat against a chemical plant. So far, there hasn't been one. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who has met several times with industry leaders, said Friday, "I don't know that you could get any higher awareness than we have today on the importance of directing resources to those efforts of securing chemicals on site." "So they are doing as good a job as they can do right now, and they're very aware of where their vulnerabilities might be," she added. But Paul Orum, director of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know, a national clearinghouse on hazardous risk information, said the chemical industry "continues to maintain excessive volumes of extremely hazardous substances in heavily populated areas, materials that if they get loose can cover schools, hospitals and residential areas with toxic fumes at dangerous levels." "The industry has been in denial about the need to reduce those hazards and set measurable goals and time lines," Orum added. Chlorine is a telling example of the complexity of the problem. While potentially a lethal weapon, it is also a safeguard: Among other uses, it is a key ingredient in Cipro, an antibiotic used to treat anthrax exposure. "Chlorine is the first line of defense against bioterrorism," said C.T. "Kip" Howlett Jr. of the Chlorine Chemistry Council, as he strongly defended the widespread use and storage of the gas. Last year, U.S. chemical companies and related industries reported 32,435 fires, spills or explosions involving hazardous chemicals to the National Response Center, an extensive but incomplete federal record of mishaps involving oil or chemicals. At least 1,000 of these events each year involve death, injury or evacuation. Combined data from additional federal sources suggest that in 1998 -- the last year for which full data were available -- there were more than 100 deaths and nearly 5,000 injuries, according to Orum's group. A single accident at any of the nearly 50 chemical plants operating between Baton Rouge and New Orleans potentially could put at risk 10,000 to 1 million people, according to "worst-case" scenarios that companies are required by law to file with the EPA. Those scenarios provide an estimate of the radius of a dangerous cloud of escaping gas and how many people it could affect. The Dow Chemical plant targeted by Greenpeace reported as its potential "worst case" the release of 800,000 pounds of hydrogen chloride, a suffocating gas that would threaten 370,000 people. Rick Hind, legislative director of the Greenpeace toxics campaign, said that the ease with which his group infiltrated that plant "shows the absolute porous nature of these facilities" and their vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Environmental and hazardous chemical experts say that serious security problems also persist to varying degrees at chemical manufacturing centers in Texas, New Jersey, Delaware, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Last July, a CSX train derailment and fire in a Baltimore tunnel paralyzed the city for five days while hydrochloric acid and other toxic chemicals contained in the tanker cars burned off or seeped into storm drains that flowed into the Inner Harbor. Around Washington, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority's Blue Plains Waste Water Treatment Plant houses one of the region's largest supplies of toxic chemicals, including liquid chlorine and sulfur dioxide. Since Sept. 11, Blue Plains plant operators have stepped up security and considered ways to disperse, shelter or eliminate the need to maintain a stockpile of chemicals. Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Jeffords (I- Vt.) introduced a bill last week that would order the EPA and the Justice Department to impose tough new regulations to guard against the threat of a terrorist attack at high-risk chemical facilities. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12445-2001Nov11.html

Defense News November 12-18, 2001 Pg. 6 Rumsfeld Seeks Consolidation Of DoD Agencies By Gail Kaufman and Amy Svitak, Washington The Pentagon plans to consolidate U.S. offices associated with homeland defense under a new undersecretary of defense, according to senior Pentagon officials, congressional staff and documents. As part of a fundamental restructuring of his entire homeland defense apparatus, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also seeks three new assistant secretaries of defense for counterterrorism; support for civil authority; and for international and humanitarian support, according to congressional staff and defense consultants. In addition, the reorganization is expected to shift the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SOLIC) to the new homeland undersecretary, senior Pentagon officials and congressional aides told Defense News. SOLIC is currently part of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. The new office would coordinate directly with Tom Ridge, head of the newly formed White House Office of Homeland Defense, Pentagon officials said. Rumsfeld, in an Oct. 3 letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., ranking minority member on the committee, requested authority to reorganize the Defense Department in the face of the current national security crisis. Defense News obtained a copy of the letter. "We need legislation that would allow me to assign homeland security duties to one or more Senate-confirmed officials," Rumsfeld wrote. "At present, current law could be read to require me to place core elements of the Homeland Security mission within the purview of a specified assistant secretary of Defense. This could constrain our ability both to prepare for and react to future events that may arise." National Preparedness Leader The new Pentagon homeland security office would be headed by an undersecretary of defense for national preparedness and combating terrorism. This office would oversee the assistant secretary of defense for SOLIC and three new assistant secretaries. In an Oct. 26 letter to Levin and Warner, Rumsfeld reiterated his interest in reorganization. Defense News obtained a copy of the Oct. 26 letter. "It remains important to come to some resolution of the issues I raised in my letter to you and Sen. Warner dated Oct. 3, 2001," Rumsfeld wrote in the Oct. 26 letter. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is looking at new organizational structure to better prepare his staff for the war against terrorism, according to the letter. "We are reviewing a number of areas in which we may be better organized for a sustained campaign against terrorism," Rumsfeld wrote. "For example, we are considering consolidating the now decentralized activities associated with homeland defense, crisis response, and consequence management. We realize that you need more specificity from us and we will work with dispatch." However, no detailed plan has been forwarded to Congress for consideration, and the Pentagon is not expected for submit final details of the proposal until early next year, congressional aides and defense analysts said. Critics of the plan argue that another level of bureaucracy is not what the Pentagon needs. "The idea … is not going to be popular," one Senate aide told Defense News. "But there are so many unanswered questions and organizational problems between Ridge’s office, the Joint Staff, the FBI, the CIA and so on, I would hesitate to throw any stones at a decision they are making right now." Christopher Hellman, senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information, a public policy research group here, said the Pentagon cannot reorganize itself in response to individual crises. "It is significant that Rumsfeld has recognized that the current civilian structure within the Pentagon isn’t adequately organized to deal with current challenges," he told Defense News Nov. 9. "The department must come up with the best approach to situations, particularly when the next asymmetric threat appears." Retired Air Force Gen. Charles Boyd, former executive director of the Hart-Rudman Commission’s National Security in the 21st Century study that urged a separate U.S. agency dedicated to homeland security, praised the effort. "It sounds like the Pentagon is attempting to organize their activities affiliated with homeland security in a serious way," Boyd told Defense News Nov. 8. "If this is the case, I applaud them." Question of Authority Robbin Laird, an independent U.S. defense consultant working in Washington and Paris, said the proposal could be a positive change "if you appoint an undersecretary of defense for this and give him authority to take a zero-base look at the Pentagon and determine what is relevant to a homeland security mission. "But if this is just another creation of sub-offices, that’s not going to help anything." The issues linked to the creation of another undersecretary or assistant secretary of defense are usually insurmountable, said one Pentagon consultant. However, "there are reasons why this would make sense," he said. "Certain organizations and functions, like SOLIC’s Territorial Security Policy mission would be combined with the function performed by the Army’s Directorate of Military Support and other related defense cells into an organization that would be more effective in dealing with Ridge’s office," the consultant said. The Army’s Directorate of Military Support commits Pentagon resources in response to requests from civil authorities, often in the form of emergency requests for assistance after natural or manmade disasters or civil disturbances. Other functions include assisting in domestic preparedness implementation in response to weapons of mass destruction. Its area of responsibility covers the United States and its territories. SOLIC is already undergoing organizational changes, according to senior Pentagon officials. Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon Worden is heading a new directorate within SOLIC called the Office of Strategic Influence. The new office will coordinate the overall influence campaign during the war on terrorism, according to several senior Pentagon officials. For example, it would focus on how the United States and its allies are perceived throughout the world.

U.S. News & World Report November 19, 2001 Wishing Upon A Star It may not work. It will cost billions. Why missile defense is a done deal By Kevin Whitelaw, Mark Mazzetti, and Richard J. Newman It was a routine evening in the control room deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs, Colo., where U.S. Space Command keeps its eye on the heavens. Then, just after 9 p.m., alarm lights began flashing. Analysts scrambled. A computerized wall-size map showed the cause-U.S. spy satellites had detected the heat pattern of a rocket launch from North Korea. Space Command quickly notified the Pentagon and U.S. forces in South Korea. As it turned out, the launch was no surprise. U.S. intelligence agencies were expecting a missile test, and they had sent surveillance planes to monitor it. Technicians tracked the Taepo Dong 1 missile as it arced over Japan, then splashed harmlessly into the Pacific. Within a few days, though, U.S. intelligence agencies discovered the North Korean launch was a big deal. The rocket carried a "third-stage" booster that could have lifted it into deep space and, once there, to U.S. territory. Although the third stage fizzled, this was a profound moment: For the first time, a minor power had demonstrated the potential to reach out and touch America from afar with a ballistic missile. It hardly mattered that the test was a failure. The missile never reached the outer atmosphere, so the North Koreans cannot know if it would have survived the punishing re-entry. And the space for a potential warhead was so small that some U.S. officials dubbed it "the golf ball of death." Still, that launch, on Aug. 31, 1998, revolutionized the missile defense debate. It effectively changed the question from whether to build a missile defense system to how to build it. This week, President Bush will discuss a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to set aside constraints on missile defense imposed by a 1972 treaty, contending that September’s terror attacks show the need to counter a possible missile attack. "Had these people had ballistic missile technology," says John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and a leading missile defense advocate, "there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it." But the terrorist attacks cut both ways in the debate over missile defense. What enemy needs intercontinental ballistic missiles, critics ask, when he can use commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction or can launch deadly attacks by dropping anthrax-laden envelopes into a mailbox? And now the nation is facing a difficult question of priorities: Should it spend billions of dollars to address its immediate vulnerabilities, or billions to counter a potential future threat from a foreign missile, or both? The choice is made all the more difficult by a slumping economy that is sending the federal budget toward the red. "How can preparing for what might happen in 2015 possibly compete with preparing for next week?" asks one intelligence official. A U.S. News examination found that even before the attacks, there were significant doubts within the U.S. government’s intelligence and security agencies about the urgency and extent of the ballistic missile threat. l Intelligence agencies believe terrorists are unlikely to acquire ballistic missiles. Instead, the threat is from so-called rogue nations like North Korea, which can be influenced by traditional diplomacy. -CIA and Pentagon experts rate the probability of a missile attack against the United States as extremely low. They are far more concerned about a "backpack bomb"a chemical, biological, or nuclear device smuggled into the country. - Buried in classified documents, comments by parts of the intelligence community challenged several conclusions in a crucial 1999 intelligence report that upgraded the urgency of the North Korean missile threat. Dissenters say their views have never been aired because of political sensitivities surrounding missile defense. - U.S. intelligence experts have pushed back the timetable on North Korea’s missile development over the past two years, although this has not been made public. Early in his term, President Bush outlined an ambitious plan for a missile defense system, envisioning a futuristic arsenal of land, sea, air, and space weapons, most yet to be developed. The scale of the technological challenge, say Bush aides, is the same as that of the Apollo moon landing and the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. The comparison is apt in another respect: Preliminary estimates suggest that the cost of Bush’s plan will certainly top $100 billion and could easily hit $200 billionmore than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project and the moon landing combined. In some ways, missile defense is President Bush’s other faith-based initiative-growing out of a conviction that science will overcome profound technological hurdles. In a defense bill still awaiting debate in Congress, Bush is asking for a massive increase in spending for missile defense. But critics contend the plan will break the usual rules for government programs by moving ahead with unproven technology to build a system that hasn’t been designed yet all of which is a formula for huge delays and cost overruns. National missile defense has an undeniable appeal. In fact, many Americans believe-wrongly-that the United States already has such a system. Costly and ineffective programs in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty, in which Washington and Moscow agreed to forgo large-scale defenses and rely on simple deterrence. President Reagan revived the cause when he proposed to break the abm treaty and shelter the entire nation with a massive shield, a plan quickly dubbed Star Wars. Interest waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet dreams of missile defense were kept alive by a core group of Republican believers, who began talking about rogue nations and terrorists. They found an unexpectedly powerful weapon in a panel of defense experts led by the man who would become defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The Republican-led Congress had created the Rumsfeld commission out of anger at a 1995 "national intelligence estimate," which concluded that no country other than Russia or China was likely to develop long-range ballistic missiles before 2010. NIEs, which represent the consensus view of the intelligence community, are supposed to provide the basis for national security planning, and conservatives feared the cia was downplaying the threat to justify gutting missile defense funding. "I knew and virtually everybody else knew that the 1995 NIE was criticized because it didn’t meet the political need to display a threat," says Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. One-two punch. When the bipartisan Rumsfeld report was released, its conclusions were alarming: North Korea and Iran could develop long-range missile capabilities in as few as five years and with little warning. The panel also blasted the CIA’s 1995 analysis. The timing was exquisite: Forty-seven days later, the North Koreans tested their big new missile. At any other time, the impact of this one-two punch might have been temporary. (After all, thanks in part to U.S. diplomacy, the North Koreans have yet to run another test.) But this was the bizarre and politically charged year of 1998. The United States was reeling from terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and from allegations that China stole U.S. missile secrets. A distracted Clinton administration was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Given the siege atmosphere in Washington, missile defense was not the kind of issue that anybody was eager to oppose. Taking the heat. The intelligence community, meanwhile, was still smarting from criticism of the 1995 NIE and its subsequent failure to predict India’s nuclear test. So when the 1999 NIE was released, it unsurprisingly followed the Rumsfeld report’s lead. It acknowledged that North Korea, Iran, and possibly Iraq could develop long-range missiles within 15 yearsbut added that the nonmissile threat from weapons of mass destruction was more serious. "They didn’t have new information," says Lee Feinstein, a former State Department official who worked on nonproliferation. "They felt a lot of political pressure from Congress." The supervisor of that NIE disagrees, insisting the updated estimate was more rigorous than the old one. "We invested a helluva lot of time assessing the technological capability irrespective of motivation and intention," says John Gannon, then head of the National Intelligence Council, which drafts the NIEs. But U.S. News has learned that parts of the intelligence community disputed the conclusions that the North Koreans had the know-how to build a missile before 2010. "We had valid objections," says one former intelligence official, "but it was not possible to roll this thing back." In fact, the classified version contains numerous dissenting footnotes from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and other agencies that were omitted from the unclassified summary, including ones about the odds of inducing North Korea to abandon its missile program through diplomacy. Many missile experts also remain skeptical about the shift. For one, the standard was implicitly changed from what was likely to what was merely possible. The new estimate also set aside questions about the complex infrastructure needed to support a missile launch. "Suddenly," says former U.S. arms control official Janne Nolan, "[missile] accuracy doesn’t matter. Command and control don’t matter. [Missiles] could just spring out and be launched. Range became the only criterion." U.S. News has also learned that in subsequent classified NIEs, analysts have pushed back the timetable for North Korea’s weapons development. Still, the 1999 estimate in effect sealed the political debate on the fate of missile defense. "For people who were not enthusiastic about missile defense, there was nowhere to hide," says one former Clinton administration official. Not long after, Clinton announced his vision of a limited land-based system aimed at a rogue missile threat. But only one of the first three tests was successful, and he deferred any deployment decision to his successor. President Bush has wasted no time. Defense Department planners are now working on a more expansivethough still undefinedsystem that would involve land-based rockets, missile-firing ships, satellites, and lasers shot from 747s circling high above enemy territory.Bush aides refuse to be pinned down on what the proposed system might look like, but they are attempting to make a strategic shift from a "threat-based" defense strategy to a "capabilities-based" strategy. "Instead of focusing on who our next adversary might be or where a war might occur," Rumsfeld wrote recently, "we must focus on how an adversary might fight, and develop new capabilities to deter and defeat that adversary." But any threat assessment requires making tough tradeoffs. "Every dollar you spend on [missile defense] is a dollar less you can spend on other defense needs," says Democratic Sen. Jack Reed from Rhode Island. Few defense experts doubt the gravity of the threat from weapons of mass destruction. Missiles are an obvious way to deliver these weapons. There is broad support for theater missile defense systems (like the Patriot system used in the Gulf War) to protect U.S. forces abroad from short-range missiles. The controversy is over whether these weapons would ever be delivered on long-range missiles against the U.S. homelandand consequently over the need for elaborate defenses. Rogue threat? Missile technology is clearly spreading to nations like Iraq or North Korea. But even if a rogue state were to develop a functioning ballistic missile, would it choose to actually use it? Such an attack would almost certainly trigger an overwhelming and perhaps nuclear response from the United States. U.S. News has learned that a confidential State Department study prepared for the agency’s senior leadership last year concluded that the U.S. arsenal would in fact deter rogue leaders. Much of the intelligence community agrees. "In terms of scenarios for long-range missiles, no one has come up with anywhere they would use them, and that make sense," says one U.S. intelligence official. A missile launch would provide an instant "return address." One Capitol Hill expert says, "The most frustrating thing after September 11 is that we don’t know where to target these people. If they had shot a missile, we would have had them in 20 minutes." The attacks have brought into sharper focus American vulnerabilities to far less traceable approaches than a missile strike. A nuclear warhead, for example, could be slipped into the country aboard a cargo ship and detonated. Says Owen Cote, an MIT national security expert, focusing so heavily on a missile shield "is like building a $100 billion lock for the back door when there’s no wall on the back of your house." The Bush team clearly fears the missile capabilities of rogue nations like Iraq or North Korea. "We are probably already vulnerable," says one Bush administration official. But when pressed, Bush aides admit they are more concerned about the presence of missiles than an actual attack. By possessing a long-range missile, a rogue state might limit America’s freedom of action in defending allies around the world. For instance, a leader like North Korea’s Kim Jong Il might feel emboldened to mount an attack on South Korea if he could hold off American intervention with the threat of a missile strike against the United States. "You always have to ask yourself, ‘Why are countries building ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States or our allies?’" says J.D. Crouch, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. "They’re building them, I think, principally because they want to have leverage over the United States." A senior administration official puts it another way: "The best way to defeat us is to deter us." China syndrome. If rogue states with a handful of missiles are the sole threat, many experts question why the Bush missile defense plan is so ambitious and expensive. "You can’t justify the full range of what they’re doing with the rogues alone," says Barry Blechman, a defense expert and former member of the Rumsfeld commission. Many suspect an additional factor: "I think there is an unstated third emerging threat that the system is being developed for. That is China’s ballistic missile capabilities," argues Kurt Campbell, the Pentagon’s top Asia expert during the Clinton administration. Whether or not it’s built for China, a missile shield could still have unintended consequences. A Chinese missile buildup is now nearly taken for granted. But a classified NIE written last year warns that such a development could have a domino effect throughout the Asian subcontinent, with India building up its arsenal to counter the Chinese threat, and Pakistan responding to keep pace with India. A deal with Putin on revising or setting aside the abm treaty might soothe Russia’s long-standing fears about a U.S. missile shield. But Bush’s flexibility in negotiating with Russia has been limited by his ambitious timetable. The administration wants to deploy rudimentary (and not fully tested) interceptors in Alaska before 2004, a date which many believe is motivated more by political than security concerns. Republican supporters "feel that if Bush doesn’t get re-elected, their dream will die," says Lawrence Korb, a senior defense official during the Reagan administration. "The rush is to ... deploy something by 2004 so there is no turning back." The current debate is one of priorities. And in the wake of September 11, there are even more demands on the defense budget than before. Says Steve Andreasen, the director for arms control issues on the Clinton White House for eight years, "It’s not whether to defend America; it’s how."

Washington Post November 11, 2001 Pg. 1 Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons Musharraf Says Arsenal Is Now Secure By Molly Moore and Kamran Khan, Washington Post Foreign Service ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 10 -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of the country's nuclear arsenal to at least six secret new locations and has reorganized military oversight of the nuclear forces in the weeks since Pakistan joined the U.S. campaign against terrorism, according to senior officials here. Pakistan's military began relocating critical nuclear weapons components within two days of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, fearful of possible strikes against the country's nuclear facilities, military officials said. Another reason for the movement, officials added, was to remove them from air bases and corridors that might be used by the United States in an attack on Afghanistan. Musharraf also created a new Strategic Planning Division within the nuclear program, headed by a three-star general to oversee operations. This decision, not previously disclosed, was part of the shuffle of top military and intelligence leaders just hours before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began on Oct. 7. The shake-up was designed to sideline officers considered too sympathetic to the Taliban or other extremist religious factions, officials said. Musharraf's actions were part of an effort to tighten security around Pakistan's nuclear weapons program in the face of widespread concerns that nuclear devices or fissile material could be vulnerable to attack or theft. In addition, the changes were intended to help keep control of the nuclear program out of the hands of religious hard-liners in the military if Musharraf is assassinated or ousted from office, officials said. "Nukes everywhere are susceptible to hijacking," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physics professor at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University and one of the few vocal anti-nuclear activists in Pakistan. "There are special dangers here." Although Pakistan's nuclear program remains one of the world's most secretive, the country is believed to have the materials to assemble between 30 and 40 warheads and has test-fired intermediate-range missiles that potentially could be used to launch them, according to intelligence reports and nuclear experts. Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, have fought three conventional wars, two of them over the contentious Kashmir border region. Both Pakistan and India tested underground nuclear devices in 1998, and the two countries are viewed by many security experts as the globe's most worrisome nuclear flashpoint. An escalation of attacks across the Kashmir border just over two years ago underscored the dangers between the distrustful neighbors. Pakistani fears of an Indian attack on its nuclear sites were so great in the summer of 1999, after Pakistani-supported guerrillas invaded Indian territory, that military officers here secretly contacted Taliban officials about the possibility of moving some nuclear assets west to neighboring Afghanistan for safekeeping, according to a recently retired Pakistani general officer familiar with the talks. "The option was actively discussed with the Taliban after some indications emerged that India may open hostilities at the eastern border," the official said. "The Taliban accepted the requests with open arms." The official also said the talks were "exploratory" and that no nuclear-related assets were placed in Afghanistan. At the time, Pakistan's military and intelligence services had close relations with the Taliban, providing training, weapons and other support. Concerned that the 1999 flare-up could lead to full-scale war between India and Pakistan, President Bill Clinton intervened, inviting Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister at the time, to the White House for a July 4 meeting. Musharraf, who ousted Pakistan's civilian government in a nonviolent coup six months later, now controls the nuclear weapons program more by virtue of his position as army chief of staff than his title as president. Pakistan's nuclear program has always been under the control of the military, which has often hidden the most basic details of the program from civilian leaders. Since agreeing to assist the United States in the military and anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan, Musharraf has remained solidly in control of Pakistan and its military. Speaking today before the U.N. General Assembly, he sought to reassure the world that his country's nuclear arsenal was secure. "Pakistan is fully alive to the responsibilities of its nuclear status," Musharraf said. "Let me assure you all that our strategic assets are well guarded and in safe hands." But some military leaders and political analysts have expressed concern about whether his grip will weaken if the conflict in Afghanistan continues. Pakistan in the past 25 years has endured two military coups, four dismissed governments and an attempted coup against the top civilian and military leadership. After the 1998 tests, Pakistan's civilian prime minister, Sharif, had promised to set up a national command authority over the nuclear arsenal, but his efforts stalled over over what role the army would allow civilian authorities to play, Pakistani officials said. With Musharraf's coup and military control over the country in 1999, the question of civilian control became moot. In February 2000, Musharraf established the National Command Authority over the nuclear program. Last month he further tightened oversight, creating the new division to handle the daily operations and control of the nuclear program, officials said. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who answers directly to Musharraf, is now directing the operational security of the country's nuclear sites and weapons. Military officials said he has increased the number of troops and antiaircraft batteries guarding sensitive locations, and has supervised the relocation of nuclear devices and potential delivery vehicles, such as missiles and aircraft. Reports by the CIA and other sources say Pakistan stores its nuclear weapons devices and missiles separately. However, military officials here said that in emergency conditions, such as those of the past two months, equipment is repositioned to allow for rapid assembly. Pakistani officials said that in general the repositioning represented a dispersal of the materials, but details could not be learned. Pakistani officials have dismissed recent reports of alleged U.S. contingency plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear devices in the event that Musharraf is overthrown or assassinated by religious extremists. "It would be an unmitigated disaster," said Mushahid Hussain, a ranking official in the Sharif government at the time of Pakistan's nuclear tests. "You would be talking about waging war on Pakistan," he said, adding that if the United States had sufficient intelligence to locate Pakistan's nuclear sites, "we wouldn't have built the bomb." Still, for many Pakistanis, U.S. officials and international observers, one of the greatest concerns for the country's nuclear weapons program is the potential that extremist Islamic elements could either gain control of the nuclear weapons or materials, or share knowledge about them with hostile organizations or regimes. "Both India and Pakistan have their own fundamentalists," Abdul Qadir Khan, the now-retired founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, said in an interview earlier this year. "This is a serious matter, and we don't want to take any chances that they could fall into the wrong hands." Six years ago a group of Pakistani army officers, described at the time as holding "fanatic Islamic views," was arrested for plotting to overthrow then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto, as well as the army chief of staff, Gen. Abdul Waheed. Waheed had angered extremist elements in the military when he fired the chief of Pakistan's intelligence service for providing covert military support to Muslim rebels in about a dozen countries. Musharraf has likewise attempted to purge the military and intelligence services of officers he considers overly sympathetic to the Taliban and other extremist religious groups. He fired the country's top intelligence chief and reassigned other key officials two hours before the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. Another sign of anxiety over the nuclear program was the unusual arrest last month of three Pakistani nuclear scientists, including one of the country's most decorated nuclear experts. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held key appointments in each of Pakistan's three most important nuclear facilities in a career that spanned nearly three decades and earned him the country's second-highest civilian award, remains under investigation by Pakistan's military intelligence services for alleged meetings with Taliban officials and Arab nationals during three visits to Kandahar, the birthplace and spiritual capital of the Taliban, according to an official familiar with the probe. "The basic fact that Mahmood came in contact with some Arabs -- close to both [Taliban leader] Mullah Mohammad Omar and Osama bin Laden -- is enough to keep him under investigation," the official said. Pakistani officials said that throughout his interrogation by senior military intelligence officials, Mahmood insisted that his contacts with Taliban ministers and two Arab nationals in Kandahar were related to the work of Ummah Tameer-e-Nau [Islamic Reconstruction], a relief agency he helped establish last year for building roads and other construction projects in Afghanistan. The two other nuclear scientists who were arrested reportedly worked for the same charitable organization. One has been cleared of suspicion, while the other remains under investigation, officials said. A Pakistani government official said last week that all three men had been cleared of any wrongdoing, but officials involved in the investigation said it is continuing. "We would love to believe all . . . [Mahmood] says, but some questions like the satellite phone calls that he had received from Afghanistan in August this year are yet to be answered to our satisfaction," the official said. "It would still be premature to claim that Mahmood discussed his nuclear expertise with his foreign friends." Under questioning, Mahmood indicated that he became disillusioned with the Pakistani government when the Inter- Services Intelligence agency recommended his transfer from the sensitive position of the director of plutonium production at the Khushab atomic reactor to a desk job in the spring of 1999, according to the official. Senior Pakistani officials reportedly were concerned that Mahmood had been vocally advocating extensive production of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium enrichment to help equip other Islamic nations with nuclear arsenals. "Intelligence agencies had strongly recommended that it would be dangerous to allow Mahmood to hold a crucial appointment at the country's plutonium production facility," said a senior civilian official involved in Pakistan's nuclear program. A family friend, who asked that his name not be used, said Mahmood felt betrayed by the government he had served for 28 years. The friend said that in a recent conversation, Mahmood told him that his knowledge about Pakistan's nuclear program was a state secret, but not his expertise on enriching uranium and producing weapons-grade plutonium. Mahmood did not hide his personal views, which he articulated in numerous public speeches in the past several months, according to several associates. Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan. Correspondent Pamela Constable and researcher Yesim Forsythe also contributed to this report.

USA Today November 12, 2001 Pg. 1 Terrorists Courted Nuclear Scientists 10 Pakistani experts contacted, sources say; several agreed to work on Afghan weapons By Jack Kelley, USA Today ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least 10 of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists were contacted by representatives of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist organization seeking their help to build a nuclear weapons program inside Afghanistan, senior U.S. and Pakistani officials said. The contacts are among the first hard evidence that bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been trying to develop a weapon of mass destruction, U.S. officials familiar with the evidence say. They also underscore U.S. concerns that Pakistan's nuclear secrets could fall into the hands of terrorists — though there is no firm evidence yet that bin Laden possesses weapons-grade technology, they said. Several of the Pakistani scientists accepted the representatives' offers, said U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the offers. But the scientists, many of whom are Taliban sympathizers and recent retirees, told the representatives that they would only work in Afghanistan with the approval of the Pakistani government, the officials said. Intelligence experts in the West doubt bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network has nuclear weapons. "I think it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon, but on the other hand, with the determination they have, they may very well," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday. U.S. officials say bin Laden might have nuclear material for a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency said the offers, which were made within the past 2 years in Pakistan, were in the "early stages." It also said that only one of the scientists had traveled to Afghanistan since the offers were made. After being informed of the offers by the FBI and CIA last month, ISI officials detained 10 people with "specific knowledge" of the country's nuclear weapons program to see whether they had been passing some of their nuclear expertise, raw materials or weaponry to the Taliban, U.S. officials said. Among those questioned was Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Since retiring in 1999, Mahmood traveled often to the Taliban stronghold city of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he built what he described as three flour mills, Pakistani officials said. The three alleged mills, which U.S. officials say could have been scientific laboratories, were destroyed in the U.S.-led bombing campaign, Pentagon officials in Washington said. Others questioned include Abdul Majid, former technical director of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons design facility, and Mirza Yusuf Baig, a former nuclear scientist. The three were questioned by ISI, CIA and FBI investigators, released, and then questioned again, their families said. Pakistan, which started its nuclear program in 1974 and has at least 24 nuclear warheads, insists its nuclear technology and secrets are under tight safeguards. After Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf ordered a redeployment of the country's nuclear arsenal to at least six secret new locations and reorganized military oversight of the nuclear forces.

New York Times November 12, 2001 Lax Nuclear Security In Russia Is Cited As Way For Bin Laden To Get Arms By Steven Erlanger VIENNA, Nov. 10 — In the last year, there have been dozens of violations of nuclear security rules in Russia and at least one loss of fissile material; Taliban emissaries have tried to recruit Russian scientists, and terrorists have tried to stake out a Russian nuclear storage site at least twice, say senior officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western governments. The officials detailed the incidents, citing conversations with Russian officials and verified news reports. Despite significant improvements in Russian nuclear security in the 1990's — some of it with American money and advice — up to half of ex-Soviet civilian and military nuclear stockpiles with weapons-grade material are not well protected. Officials of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body for monitoring nuclear programs, are deeply skeptical of Osama bin Laden's claim, in an interview published in Pakistan on Friday, that he possesses nuclear weapons. On the other hand, given the vulnerability of material in the former Soviet Union, the increasing professionalism of nuclear smuggling and the relative ease of fabricating a primitive weapon, they cannot rule it out. In the Kazakh port of Aktau on the Caspian shore, one ton of plutonium and two tons of highly enriched uranium sit near a now closed breeder reactor. Ukraine, with 17 nuclear reactors and one research reactor, is considered a country of "serious concern" by officials because of its climate of government corruption and crime. Enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb remains at a research reactor just outside Belgrade throughout the 1999 Kosovo war. Just last week, Turkey announced it had broken up a gang of smugglers who tried to sell 2.2 pounds of what appeared to be highly enriched uranium for $750,000 to undercover police officers, material they said they had bought several months ago from a Russian of Azeri origin. Officials are increasingly concerned that terrorists willing to die could create a "dirty bomb," wrapping more easily stolen radioactive materials used in medicine and industry around a conventional explosive, like dynamite, to try to make a significant area of a city uninhabitable for many years. Russian officials say their fissile nuclear material is under strict and improving controls. But only 10 days ago, in a discussion with officials at the United Nations agency here, Yuri G. Volodin, chief of safeguards for the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, revealed that in the last year, there were dozens of violations of Russia's regulations for securing and accounting for nuclear material. Mr. Volodin noted one loss of nuclear material, which he called of the "highest consequence." He said he could not be more specific about the type of material or the size of the loss. Last month, Col.-Gen. Igor Volynkin, head of nuclear security for Russia's military, said that twice this year Russian forces discovered stakeouts by terrorists of a secret nuclear arms storage facility, although he did not say where. Also last month, an official of the Russian Security Council, Raisa Vdovichenko, told Russian journalists that emissaries of the Taliban had asked an employee of "an institution related to nuclear technologies to go to their country to work there in this field." There is continuing evidence of efforts to traffic in nuclear material that give many officials deep concern. In April 2000, the police in Georgia seized, in Batumi, several hundred fast-reactor fuel pellets, containing 920 grams — nearly a kilogram — of highly enriched uranium; in September, at Tbilisi airport, the police confiscated half a gram of plutonium. The Russians say they thwarted an effort, at the very end of 1998, by an organized gang to steal 18.5 kilograms — more than 40 pounds — of highly enriched uranium from a military weapons facility near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. Still, senior officials here and in Washington do not believe that Mr. bin Laden or even any state interested in a shortcut to a bomb — from Syria and Iran to Iraq and Libya — has been able to obtain the roughly 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of highly enriched uranium required to make a simple bomb, or the roughly 8 kilograms (17.6 pounds) of plutonium, a much more difficult material with which to work. But they also admit that they cannot possibly know for sure. The atomic energy agency has built a database of incidents of nuclear trafficking since 1993 — only counting incidents confirmed by the states involved. Of the 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material and 201 cases of trafficking in medical and industrial radioactive materials, only some 18 cases involved even small amounts of the fissionable material needed for a nuclear bomb — plutonium or highly enriched uranium (enriched by 20 percent or more). Altogether in all these cases, agency officials say, there have been seizures of about 400 grams (nearly one pound) of plutonium and an additional 12 kilograms (26.4 pounds) of uranium at varying levels of enrichment, equivalent to only some 6 kilograms of uranium 235. The most serious cases, involving large amounts of material, took place in 1993 and 1994, when Russian, German and Czech police officers made large seizures of very highly enriched nuclear material manufactured in the former Soviet Union, usually at nuclear-fuel fabrication plants. In March 1993, in St. Petersburg, nearly three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of 90 percent enriched uranium-238 were seized; in August 1994, in Munich, the police seized about 360 grams of Russian-made plutonium; in December 1994, 2.7 kilograms (just over 5 pounds) of 80 percent enriched uranium-235 were seized, part of a shipment that showed up in smaller amounts in other places — and which officials hope was not part of an even larger shipment, apparently stolen from the Russian nuclear research center in Obninsk, about an hour's drive southwest of Moscow. For context, officials point out, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had made only 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of bomb- capable uranium before the gulf war broke out. But in fact the atomic energy agency's database is only a guide, and perhaps not even a good one. "Are we seeing half the iceberg or only the tip?" said one official, noting that the police consider seizures of drugs, a commodity far easier to secure, to represent only some 10 to 20 percent of what is shipped. Nor does the agency, devoted to civilian nuclear energy, know much about the military programs of states with nuclear weapons. Friedrich Steinhäusler, a physics professor at Stanford University and co-director of a Stanford center on the physical protection of nuclear materials, said, "It's clear that we're seeing a typical move toward professionalism in this smuggling business, with increasingly fewer incidents of significance, but of greater significance, as professionals are probing the market." He noted that traffickers increasingly are going south, over traditional smuggling routes through Turkey, the Caucasus and especially central Asia, closer to Afghanistan, where borders are extremely long and lax. Matthew Bunn, assistant director of the science, technology and public policy program at Harvard University's Kennedy School, was a Clinton White House adviser. The main source of loose nuclear material remains the former Soviet Union, he says, with some 600 tons of weapons- grade nuclear material stored there outside of warheads. The key question, he says, is to improve the security around military and especially civilian nuclear installations. In as many as half, he said, there are no automatic detectors that sound an alarm if material is smuggled out, and no security cameras where material is stored. "For all the work we've done with Russia, after seven years, we still have most of the job to do," Mr. Bunn said. "This is a serious threat, and we know how to fix it," he said, urging that President Bush agree with Russia at the this week's summit meeting to account for and secure all nuclear material. Some safeguards put in place by the Americans in the former Soviet Union no longer function, agency officials said — spare parts are expensive and available only from the United States, and sometimes guards do not bother to use the equipment. The Vienna agency is also looking for a 10 percent increase in its own budget of some $320 million, said Graham Andrew, the special assistant for Scientific and Technical Affairs, to upgrade security standards around the world. He and other officials regard a terrorist nuclear bomb to be "highly unlikely." But the likelihood of terrorists compiling the radioactive materials necessary to make a dirty bomb with immense economic and psychological impact is much higher, the officials say. The dirty bomb is an almost ideal instrument of terror, Mr. Bunn said. It would not kill many people, but it would terrify, and make a large area unsafe to work or live in, possibly for decades or longer. One official said: "Imagine a dirty bomb on the Washington mall. Do you abandon the White House?"

Washington Post November 12, 2001 Pg. 6 U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting Some Delegates at U.N. Session Upset at Latest Snub of Pact Bush Won't Back By Colum Lynch, Special to The Washington Post UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 -- The Bush administration today boycotted a U.N. conference convened by Secretary General Kofi Annan to encourage states to ratify a global treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. The decision to sidestep the three-day event represents the latest demonstration of U.S. opposition to the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has been signed by 161 countries, including the United States, and ratified by 85. President Bush has made it clear that he will never submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification. But some delegates were miffed that the United States had chosen to snub many of its closest allies at a time that it is seeking to build a coalition to fight terrorism. The decision brought an end to weeks of internal debate in the Bush administration over the wisdom of accepting an invitation to attend the conference as an observer. "We're not attending," a senior State Department official said today. "This is a meeting for ratifying states and we've made it clear we're not going to ratify." The State Department had initially favored sending a low-level delegation to avoid a diplomatic confrontation. But the Pentagon hoped that a U.S. boycott would contribute to hastening the death of the nuclear pact. The nuclear accord has long been a target of U.S. conservatives. In 1999, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 51-48 to reject a bid by President Bill Clinton to ratify the pact. Bush and his advisers have argued that the treaty is impossible to verify and that it may need to test weapons to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Russia, which has ratified the treaty, warned that the resumption of atomic tests could restart the nuclear arms race. Igor Sergeev, a special assistant to President Vladimir Putin, proposed today that the United States consider new negotiations aimed at improving the ability to verify treaty violations. Wolfgang Hoffmann, the Mexican chairman of the conference, said that he expected other countries to follow Russia's lead. "This will obviously be a road down which many delegations will want to go in order to accommodate one very important signatory." Annan told delegates at the opening session this morning that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington underscored the urgency of limiting the scope of the world's handful of nuclear weapons programs. "We have a precious but fleeting opportunity to render this troubled world a safer place, free of the threat of nuclear weapons," he said. "We must not let it pass." Although the treaty has widespread support, its prospects for becoming law remain dim. The pact can only go into force after it is ratified by all 44 countries which have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Thirteen of those nations, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, have yet to ratify the pact. Washington and New Dehli, which violated an informal international moratorium on nuclear tests in 1998, have insisted they will never allow the treaty to become law. But Hoffmann said that he was still hopeful that the United States would one day ratify the pact. "I don't think there is unanimity within the U.S. administration on these issues," he said. "I think that if you keep up the pressure on the United States they will come around."

Washington Post November 13, 2001 Pg. 2 Officials Hope Russia Will Accede On Missile Defense By Dana Milbank and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writers On the eve of a three-day summit between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush administration officials are optimistic the Russians will agree to allow the United States to test a missile defense system without formally withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Both sides are also likely to announce drastic reductions in their nuclear arsenals, and to increase economic, proliferation and anti-terrorism cooperation, officials said. Despite the momentous nature of such moves, however, administration officials are quick to say they do not expect a formal accord that both parties would sign. Administration officials dismissed the notion of a joint communique from the two presidents as "Cold War-style." In keeping with their distaste for arms treaties and their desire to keep their options open on missile defense, administration officials said any agreements would likely be announced "on separate pieces of paper" that would be informational in tone. "I wouldn't expect any particular arrangements to come out of any particular meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said when outlining this week's meetings. The United States hopes to reduce its nuclear warheads unilaterally, and administration officials have set the optimum number somewhere around 2,000. Both countries have about 6,000 warheads, and the Russians have already been moving toward their own unilateral reductions. "I have a number that I'll share with him, and it is going to be substantially lower than today's weaponry," Bush told Russian reporters yesterday. "And I presume he'll have a number that he'll share with me." Bush said the United States will reduce its arsenal "regardless of whether he were to or not." In the new "partnership" both are seeking, neither country wants a confrontation over the 1972 ABM treaty. Although the Bush administration has declared it obsolete, officials said the United States has proposed a deal under which it would proceed with its missile defense tests, but keep the Russians informed. In exchange, the Russians would refrain from declaring the tests to be treaty violations. "The question is whether Putin is prepared to have a wink and a nod" in place of a formal agreement, said a person familiar with the proposal. Such an understanding would allow Putin to claim victory in preserving a treaty that, just months ago, Bush declared he was prepared to tear up. Putin has made favorable comments about linking a modified ABM to deep arms cuts, and over the weekend declared he was "very optimistic" about such an approach, although the United States had yet to present him with specific proposals. Under normal circumstances, such an arrangement might be a major breakthrough. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, a deal on missile defense has become possible precisely because the issue has shrunk in importance. Neither side believes the questions of nuclear stockpiles, missile defense and the ABM treaty are the most urgent concerns. "In many ways they have much more important things to talk about now than to squabble over the ABM treaty -- and that's why this deal is going to happen," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Bush and Putin both win politically. Diplomatically, the coalition against terrorism strengthens, and strategically there are real planned reductions in nuclear dangers." The American military action in Afghanistan tops the list, along with the possibility that the next target in the anti- terrorism campaign could be Iraq. Another priority for Bush is the expansion of NATO into the Baltic nations. As with missile defense, the United States in all three cases is not seeking formal Russian agreement, but tacit approval. Russia, in turn, is looking for the Americans to soften their objections to Russian actions in Chechnya, and to support Russian entry into the World Trade Organization. And Putin's principal goal at the meeting is to make clear that Russia is still a major world player and partner with the United States. "This thing isn't only about arms control," said William E. Odom, a retired general who authored a report on U.S. nuclear forces in January with several people who are now working in the Bush administration. "There are much bigger issues." Above all, he said, the United States must make sure Putin "goes away with a position making it harder for him to be a spoiler in our counterterrorism efforts." Bush must seek to convince Russia not to sell arms to Iran, possibly by offering to compensate Russia for losses from canceling such sales. The administration is also seeking to overcome Russian objections to its proposed "smart sanctions" that would allow Iraq to sell more oil while refining the restrictions on what items Iraq can spend the money. Iraq would use proceeds to pay Russia some of the $9 billion it owes. In one indication of the new priorities, the two presidents will begin their talks this morning with America's most pressing subject: terrorism. The two leaders will continue discussions about developments in central Asia that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov had in New York yesterday. Military advances by the Northern Alliance in recent days have increased the urgency of developing an interim, representative government for Afghanistan, as well as a multilateral force that can move quickly into Kabul and maintain its neutrality among contesting Afghan ethnic and tribal groups until the all-party government can take root. Next, the two presidents will spend lunch in the White House residence talking about economic issues. The Russians want trade concessions, particularly some sign about early Russian entry in WTO. Although Russian economic gains have made it less important than several years ago, Moscow would still like some reduction of Soviet-era debt. The United States holds about $6 billion of such debt. After a joint news conference in the East Room, Bush will head for Crawford in the late afternoon, while Putin prepares for an address he is to deliver at the Russian embassy Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning, Putin heads for Texas, stopping for a speech at Houston's Rice University before arriving in Crawford by mid-afternoon. Then begins the folksy part of what Bush called the "Crawford Summit." The two will engage in some ranch activity: a tour, perhaps "clearing some cedar" as part of Bush's ongoing effort to fulfill his agreement with his wife to make the place livable, and dinner with their wives. The two couples will breakfast together, and Putin will leave for New York, where he plans to visit ground zero before returning to Russia Thursday night.

Washington Post November 13, 2001 Pg. 22 Senior Russian Official Reveals Nuclear Material Theft Attempt Report Coincides With Bin Laden's Claim to Have Weapons By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer A senior Russian official has reported a major incident involving the attempted theft of nuclear materials in the past two years, raising fresh fears about the security of the former superpower's aging nuclear arsenal. The incident, revealed in a report by the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, coincides with claims by Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden that he has acquired weapons of mass destruction and would be willing to use them as a last resort. While U.S. officials are skeptical that bin Laden has acquired a real nuclear weapon, they believe he might have acquired radiological materials that could be scattered into the atmosphere with the help of a conventional bomb. A White House official said he had no information to support claims in the Pakistani media that bin Laden had met with retired Pakistani nuclear scientists who have shown sympathy for his fundamentalist Islamic views. Earlier, a well-placed Pakistani official told The Washington Post that one of the architects of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, had acknowledged holding meetings on humanitarian matters with bin Laden associates in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The report of a serious attempt to compromise Russian nuclear security surfaced at a conference this month in Vienna hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency that was convened to discuss the possibility of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities. Western experts at the conference were taken aback when Yuri Volodin, head of the safety department at the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, reported a previously undisclosed security violation of the "highest possible consequence" sometime during the past two years. Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University nuclear expert who worked at the Clinton White House, said Volodin refused to provide further details about the nature of the violation. Bunn said he assumed that the materials had been recovered, as otherwise the Russians would probably not have drawn attention to the incident in a public forum. Volodin could not be contacted for immediate comment. There have been dozens of attempts by smugglers and terrorists to gain access to Russia's vast nuclear arsenal in the 10 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but no leakage of sufficient quantities of highly fissile materials to build a nuclear weapon has been confirmed. Thefts of low-grade radiological material have been more frequent. While U.S. officials say there is no doubt that bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network has attempted to acquire nuclear and biological weapons, there is considerable debate over whether he has been successful. That is why considerable attention has been focused on the activities of Mahmood and other Pakistani nuclear scientists who have been questioned repeatedly by the Pakistani police over the past two weeks. According to Pakistani officials, Mahmood and his associate, Abdul Majid, told police that they went to Kandahar, the main Taliban stronghold, as part of their work for the Islamic relief organization Ummah Tamer-e-Nau. They said they helped construct a flour mill near the city, and denied passing on nuclear information or materials to anyone in Afghanistan. Mahmood's area of expertise is the production of plutonium, the highly fissile material used in some of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. He was transferred to a desk job in the spring of 1999 after publicly advocating increases in the production of plutonium to help other Islamic nations build nuclear weapons. He has also spoken out strongly in support of the radical Taliban movement, which he has described as a "movement of Islamic renaissance." Some Western experts suspect that the Kandahar flour mill could be a cover for some kind of biological or chemical weapons program, which could involve milling bacteriological agents to fine powders. It is more difficult to imagine it being used as a screen for a nuclear program. Correspondent Molly Moore in Islamabad contributed to this report.

U.S. News & World Report November 19, 2001 Washington Whispers By Margaret Mannix If you can't beat them, give them a job Bioterrorism experts say it's only a matter of time before someone wields germ warfare, the "poor man's nuke," in a big way. Ken Alibek, an anthrax expert and former bioweapons bigwig in the Soviet Union, and now president of Hadron Advanced Biosystems in Manassas, Va., has a nifty idea for preventing germ warfare know-how from falling into hostile hands. Offer those scientists jobs here in the United States, creating, say, vaccines and wonder drugs. Alibek doesn't think his former comrades would deliberately sell their souls to terrorists. But it's a tough call when you're earning $50 a month and have a family to feed. If someone offers you $10,000 for a three-page formula, "the temptation can be overwhelming." Alibek put his suggestion in a letter to CNN mogul Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn, who used to head the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both men now are cochairs of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit foundation in Washington dedicated to reducing the menace of chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks.

Washington Times November 13, 2001 Pg. 7 Anthrax Vaccine Manufacturer Faces FDA, Veterans' Scrutiny LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The only American manufacturer of an anthrax vaccine is preparing for an inspection to decide whether it can be used, but opponents are trying to call attention to what they say are its potential dangers. About 40 demonstrators protested the military's anthrax vaccination program Sunday during rallies at BioPort Corp. and Michigan's Capitol in Lansing. They say the vaccine could be connected to complaints of chronic fatigue, bone and joint pain, memory loss and other problems, and that the military has not done enough to investigate the vaccine's long-term effects or whether it can be given safely with other vaccines. "Something is wrong with the vaccine. You don't have to be a scientist to figure it out," said Steve Robinson, a Persian Gulf war veteran who now works for the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans advocacy group. He said testimony before Congress has proved that many questions about the vaccine are unanswered. The vaccine hasn't been distributed since 1998 because BioPort has failed to win approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In the past, the FDA has said BioPort was not ensuring that its labs were sterile and properly ventilated. The FDA is scheduled to inspect BioPort again in mid-December, company spokeswoman Kim Brennen Root said yesterday. If the FDA approves distribution, the government has said, the vaccine likely will go to troops and others at risk for anthrax exposure, including law enforcement and postal workers. Protesters say BioPort and the Pentagon are ignoring signs of illness in some of the 500,000 troops who have been vaccinated. But Dr. Tom Waytes, Bioport's medical director, said 18 studies indicate the vaccine is safe. Dr. Waytes said an independent panel of civilian physicians has reviewed each of the 1,623 reports of adverse reactions to the vaccine. The panel has found no pattern suggesting the vaccine causes more adverse reactions than any other vaccine, he said. He also said hospital records show that troops who have been vaccinated are as healthy in the long term as people who haven't been vaccinated. Miss Root said yesterday that it would be at least mid-December before the vaccine could be administered. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson had said on Oct. 23 that BioPort could be providing vaccines to the military by Thanksgiving. Miss Root said BioPort will start a new production cycle later this month. FDA officials will monitor that cycle when they visit in mid-December. The Pentagon originally wanted to vaccinate 2.4 million troops with BioPort's vaccine, but the vaccination program is on hold because BioPort hasn't been allowed to distribute it without FDA approval.

New York Times November 11, 2001 Al Qaeda Sites Point To Tests Of Chemicals By James Risen and Judith Miller WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 — The United States has identified sites in Afghanistan that are suspected of involvement in Osama bin Laden's efforts to acquire and produce chemical and biological weapons, but none have been bombed since the military campaign began, according to American military and intelligence officials. The American bombing has spared the sites even though American intelligence officials believe that Al Qaeda may already have produced cyanide gas at one of them, a crude chemical weapons research laboratory in Derunta, a small village near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. American officials say the intelligence reports showing the possible production of small quantities of cyanide gas provide the strongest indication they have received of Al Qaeda's success in its efforts to develop chemical weapons. Cyanide gas can be used to kill small numbers of people, but it is not easily deployed on a large scale, officials say. The intelligence reports indicating cyanide gas production bolster the United States intelligence community's overall assessment that Al Qaeda is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction but so far has only developed crude capabilities, several officials said. In addition to the Derunta chemical weapons site, American intelligence and military officials say a fertilizer plant in Mazar-i- Sharif, which the Northern Alliance captured on Friday, had been under the control of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. American officials say the fertilizer plant is near a compound that has been used by Osama bin Laden and his organization, and intelligence analysts suspected that Al Qaeda had been interested in the plant because its equipment can be used to produce either biological or chemical weapons. The fertilizer plant "is high on everybody's list" of sites suspected of involvement in Al Qaeda's chemical and biological weapons efforts, a United States military official said. It is not clear whether the Northern Alliance offensive has taken the plant out of Taliban and Al Qaeda control. An anthrax-vaccine site in Kabul has also raised concerns among intelligence analysts. The International Committee of the Red Cross had been believed to be operating the plant, which was established to produce vaccine for livestock in Afghanistan to protect them from anthrax. But American intelligence officials now say they do not believe the Red Cross controls the site, and Red Cross officials acknowledge that while it has provided funds for the plant, it is being operated by the Taliban's Ministry of Agriculture. A senior State Department official said that American experts had told him it would be difficult for Al Qaeda to use the anthrax-vaccine plant to produce anthrax weapons, and Red Cross officials have said the material produced in the laboratory is harmless. But American officials say they still believe that it is important to deny Al Qaeda operatives access to such a laboratory and any equipment it might contain. Senior officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency refused to say why the suspect sites have not been bombed one month into the American military campaign. White House officials declined to comment when asked if the decision not to bomb the sites represented a high-level decision by the administration. But the strategy seems at odds with President Bush's statements last week about the threat posed by Al Qaeda's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In a speech on Tuesday, the president warned that Al Qaeda was "seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," and said that if the group acquired such weapons it would represent "a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself." Despite the president's statements, the decision not to strike the suspect sites appears to result from a deep sense of caution among senior government officials about the quality of the intelligence collected about the sites, as well as the possible unintended political and diplomatic consequences of attacks on dual-use facilities. Collecting intelligence about facilities of this sort is an inexact science at best; intelligence officials and policy makers have learned from past mistakes to be wary when using such information. After the terrorist bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, which officials believed was connected to Al Qaeda. But the United States was heavily criticized after it became clear that the evidence linking the plant to Al Qaeda was weak, and that the C.I.A. had been unaware that the plant's ownership had changed well before the cruise missile attack. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999 also haunts the C.I.A.; analysts mistakenly believed that the building was the headquarters of a Serbian government agency involved in weapons proliferation. During the Persian Gulf war, United States officials engaged in strenuous debates over what to do about sites in Iraq that were suspected of involvement in Saddam Hussein's secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction. There was concern about the accuracy of the intelligence, and also about whether bombing raids would release dangerous chemicals or biological weapons into the atmosphere. After the war, American officials realized that in many cases their information had been incorrect and they had bombed the wrong sites, while many of the real weapons facilities had gone unscathed. One official said the Bush administration was worried that complaints might be made charging that the United States was destroying the public health and agricultural sites of Afghanistan. The official added that such dual-use targets — which could be employed to make fertilizer and vaccines, or chemical weapons and anthrax — were being deliberately avoided for that reason. Still, Al Qaeda has shown an eagerness to use whatever weapons it can obtain against American targets in its terrorist operations, and that makes its efforts to acquire chemical and biological weapons particularly worrisome to United States intelligence officials. The official intelligence assessment is that Al Qaeda has a "crude chemical — and possibly biological — capability," a Pentagon official said recently. In addition to the small quantities of cyanide gas that it may have produced, the terrorist group may also have experimented with other crude poisons such as chlorine and phosgene. United States officials said that intelligence reports of possible cyanide gas production at the Derunta site have been received for at least a year, and suggest an intense effort by Al Qaeda to experiment with virtually any poison it can obtain. The officials added, however, that they have no evidence that any other countries, including Iraq, have aided Al Qaeda's efforts to obtain such poisons. In addition, they stress that they do not have definitive evidence that Al Qaeda has actually produced the cyanide gas at Derunta. One senior official said that the belief that Al Qaeda may have produced cyanide gas is based in part on intelligence reports showing that the terrorist group has obtained instruction manuals on how to produce such poisons. Intelligence officials also stress that cyanide gas would be very difficult to turn into an effective large- scale terrorist weapon, since it is hard to transport and would dissipate rapidly in a large open space. And intelligence officials say they do not believe that Al Qaeda has yet found a way to make weapons from the poison. "They do have some primitive capabilities, but the problem is weaponizing," a senior official said. "All of the evidence is that they have not been able to do that." Meanwhile, a senior Bush administration official said that there had been concerns about reports of suspicious activity at the fertilizer plant in Mazar-i-Sharif for some time. The plant may have been spared in anticipation of a Northern Alliance takeover of the town, an administration official said. The anthrax vaccine plant in Kabul has received more attention since the United States military campaign began, in part because of concerns over whether Al Qaeda is behind the anthrax letters in the United States. American intelligence officials say they have no evidence linking Al Qaeda and the anthrax letters. But the alarm over the use of anthrax as a weapon has heightened American concerns over the presence of the laboratory in Kabul. In fact, American national security officials say they were taken by surprise when they learned after Sept. 11 that the Red Cross had provided funds to refurbish the plant in 1997, after the Taliban had come to power.

Los Angeles Times November 11, 2001 Pg. 1 Nuclear Threat Is Real, Experts Warn The former Soviet stockpile is seen as a likely source of weaponry for terrorists. Specialists cite lax security, missing materials and attempted thefts. By David Willman and Alan C. Miller, Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON -- The guards who oversee the vast, remaining nuclear stockpile of the former Soviet Union have gone months at a time without pay. Highly enriched uranium--usable for a nuclear bomb--has disappeared. Among the buyers-in-waiting is the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. President Bush last week underscored the threat, noting that Bin Laden has vowed to seek weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. Before the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, many government officials assumed that terrorists would refrain from using radioactive materials because of the grave risk to themselves. This assumption now appears outdated, raising dire questions about the possibility of terrorist attacks that could kill tens of thousands or more civilians. "Absent a major new initiative, we have every reason to expect there will be an act of nuclear terrorism in the next decade, maybe sooner," said Graham T. Allison, an assistant secretary of Defense under President Clinton. Interviews and documents show that U.S. and Russian leaders over the last decade have taken incomplete steps to safeguard a potentially large nuclear shopping mart in which scientists or officials motivated by cash meet terrorists seeking the ultimate weapon. Although Bush said his administration "will do everything we can" to thwart Bin Laden's nuclear ambitions, past promises have fallen short: As a candidate, Bush vowed to increase spending for securing the former Soviet nuclear arsenal and to press for "an accurate inventory of all this material." As president, he has done the opposite-- proposing spending cuts in his first budget. And Bush has not sought to use any of the $40 billion provided for anti- terrorism spending after Sept. 11 to better secure the coveted stockpile. With new urgency, experts are examining the widespread opportunities for terrorists to acquire nuclear materials and know-how from the former Soviet Union. A report prepared for the U.S. secretary of Energy early this year warned of "dozens" of worrisome incidents. Other government consultants have verified the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from an unguarded plant on the Black Sea, interviews and records show. A prominent U.S. physicist told The Times of being presented with an offer to buy neutron "guns," devices that can be used to detonate a nuclear bomb. And according to U.S. experts, neither the Russians nor the Americans have a complete inventory of all the highly enriched uranium and plutonium, another ingredient for a nuclear bomb. "I am concerned that weapons-usable nuclear material may have gone astray," said Rose Gottemoeller, who served as assistant secretary of Energy for nonproliferation and national security during the Clinton administration. Bin Laden Claims He Has Weapons For now, American officials say they do not know whether Bin Laden's international terror network, Al Qaeda, possesses either intact nuclear weapons or the materials to make them. But Bin Laden, in interviews in December 1998 with U.S. television and magazine reporters, said it was a "religious duty" to possess nuclear materials and chemical weapons. When Bin Laden and others were indicted in November 1998 for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, federal prosecutors alleged that "from at least as early as 1993, Osama bin Laden and others known and unknown made efforts to obtain the components of nuclear weapons." On Friday, a leading Pakistani newspaper quoted Bin Laden as saying in an interview Wednesday that he has both nuclear and chemical weapons. "I wish to declare that if America used nuclear or chemical weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent," Bin Laden said, according to the account in the English-language newspaper, Dawn. Bin Laden declined to say where he might have acquired the weapons. Al Qaeda would not be the only terrorist group to pursue nuclear materials. Aum Shinrikyo, a wealthy doomsday cult based in Japan, recruited nuclear physicists from Moscow. Investigators determined that the group also tried to mine its own uranium in Australia and to buy Russian nuclear warheads. Some analysts speculate that Bin Laden or others also could seek nuclear materials from "rogue" states such as Iran and Iraq, suspected of fomenting attacks against the U.S. The shared border and Islamic ties between Afghanistan and Pakistan have helped spur conjecture that Bin Laden has gained assistance from two or more Pakistani nuclear scientists, who were recently detained for questioning and released. The government of Pakistan insists that its nuclear weapons have remained secure. For U.S. officials, the nature of the nuclear threat has evolved since December 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved into Russia and 14 other independent states, with thousands of assembled nuclear weapons still aimed at North America. Properly securing and destroying many of those weapons remains an imperative. But what looms even larger for many security specialists are the separate and portable materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb--highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Also of great concern are other radioactive materials that could be used, with a conventional explosive, to construct a relatively simple "dirty" bomb. Such an explosive could inflict casualties on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing, and the radioactive material could contaminate a large urban area. Ingredients for Disaster With just a few kilograms of radioactive material--which can be obtained from nonmilitary sources--a terrorist could make the crude device. Weapons specialists say it could be delivered with such low-tech means as a passenger van or boat. For a nuclear device, as little as 12 kilograms, or about 26.4 pounds, of highly enriched uranium, or four kilograms-- less than a soda can full--of plutonium would be needed, along with other components that are available commercially. Building and detonating a nuclear device would take far greater scientific training than needed for the "dirty" bomb, and experts differ on how readily terrorists could execute such a mission. But the precision that the terrorists demonstrated Sept. 11 has challenged such assumptions. "We are now in a new arms race," Charles B. Curtis, deputy secretary of Energy under Clinton, said in an Oct. 29 speech to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "Terrorists and certain rogue states are racing to get weapons of mass destruction, and we are racing to stop them." Viewed from the vantage point of the Cold War, progress has been made in cooperatively identifying and reducing the former Soviet arsenal. Thousands of nuclear weapons have been dismantled. Hundreds of metrics tons of nuclear material have been placed under improved security. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars to assist the former Soviet republics in securing or eliminating nuclear weapons and material. And new efforts are expected to be discussed when Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin begin talks Tuesday in Washington. Still, the U.S. has fallen short of the actions needed to avert the calamity invited by loose nuclear materials, more than a dozen leading experts said. They voiced dismay that the government is not ramping up its efforts in the aftermath of Sept. 11. "These materials pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. national security," said John P. Holdren, a Harvard University specialist who in 1995 headed a secret study for Clinton of the security of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium within the former Soviet Union. "We haven't done enough." Nuclear Material Found Missing Just a decade ago, the city of Sukhumi was known for its comforts. Located in the Abkhazia region of the former Soviet republic of Georgia on the eastern reach of the Black Sea, it was a "how-much-wine-can-you-drink place," in the fond memory of one visitor. Then came a rebellion by ethnic separatists. The disruption affected more than the resort atmosphere. Sukhumi, it turns out, also was home to a nuclear research facility. Amid the fighting and ensuing chaos, about two kilograms of highly enriched uranium disappeared, according to a team of researchers led by William C. Potter at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an independent graduate school in California. A Russian-speaking researcher who assisted Potter, Emily Daughtry, said she confirmed the prior existence of the highly enriched uranium with both the former director of the Sukhumi nuclear research center and with Georgian Foreign Ministry officials whom she visited. She said the director told her that, in September 1993, as the city was being taken over by the Abkhazian separatists, "the scientists asked Georgian security forces for help in moving what [the director] characterized as radioactive materials out of the institute and out of the city." Daughtry, now a law student at UCLA, said the security forces were fighting the rebels and could not assist the scientists. "And so the scientists surrounded the material storage areas with concrete blocks, and then they left," she said. "They fled the city; they couldn't take it with them." When a team of Russian inspectors finally gained access to the Sukhumi facility, about 880 miles southeast of Moscow, in December 1997, they found it deserted, according to Potter. He said the inspectors found none of the highly enriched uranium, although other radioactive material was present. "This is an instance in which weapons-grade material is known to have disappeared," said Potter, who also is a consultant to the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He said he shared his findings with U.S. officials. The Times was unable to reach the former director of the Sukhumi nuclear center. In Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian nuclear energy ministry, Yuri Bespalko, said he was unaware of weapons material missing from Sukhumi or any other location. "There is definitely a full inventory of all nuclear materials in Russia, and it is simply impossible that something could go missing," Bespalko said. "Today, nothing threatens Russia's nuclear installations. As for former Soviet republics . . . there may have been separate cases in the past, but today, according to our information, all nuclear materials are under a reliable protection." Current and former U.S. officials say the record suggests otherwise. The Monterey Institute has documented 11 cases of diversion and recovery of uranium and plutonium from 1992 to 1997. More recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency described six arrests or seizures of weapons-grade nuclear material linked to the former Soviet Union from 1999 through last January. The January report of a task force led by Republican Howard H. Baker Jr., a former U.S. senator and White House chief of staff, and Democrat Lloyd N. Cutler, a former White House counsel, referred to "dozens" of incidents of attempted theft. Culture of Deal-Making In 1998, the report said, employees of a Russian nuclear facility in Chelyabinsk were caught "attempting to steal fissile material of a quantity just short of that needed for one nuclear device." Also in 1998, a Russian employee at a lab in Arzamas was charged with "attempting to sell documents on nuclear weapons designs to agents of Iraq and Afghanistan for $3 million," according to the task force report. In January 2000, Russian agents arrested four sailors at a base on the Kamchatka Peninsula with a stash that included radioactive materials they were suspected of having stolen from their submarine. The regional head of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB, attributed the Arzamas case and others to the "very difficult financial position" of workers at the nuclear defense facilities, the report said. Indeed, specialists who commute to Russia say that a culture of deal-making persists. "People are trying to sell all various things," said Thomas L. Neff, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist who pioneered a program that buys the Russians' highly enriched uranium and recycles it for nonmilitary purposes. Neff described an incident several years ago in which a Russian engineer he met outside a nuclear weapons facility in the town of Lesnoy offered to sell him 700 neutron guns, devices that can be used both for detonating a nuclear bomb and for oil drilling. Neff said he reported the overture to U.S. authorities. "That's just the tip of the iceberg," Neff said. "I had a number of experiences like that. . . . Engineers have come out and talked to me, brought me out samples of their stuff, which is pretty scary. . . . I mean, I could have been anybody." Just last month, Igor Volynkin, head of the defense agency responsible for protecting Russia's nuclear arsenal, told reporters that on two occasions in the last year, terrorists had staked out nuclear facilities. Security was beefed up in response, Volynkin said. Potter, who participated in two National Academy of Sciences studies of the security of the former Soviet nuclear facilities, said "the Russians maintain that they have accounted for everything. In fact, anybody who's ever been to one of these Russian facilities knows that that is a joke." Based on the volume of known theft attempts, Potter said, it is "likely that Western observers of the nuclear trafficking scene have missed significant instances of diversion and/or export." Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union have a total of about 1,100 metric tons of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium and 160 metric tons of plutonium at 123 sites, according to specialists and U.S. government reports. This includes 603 metric tons of weapons-grade material stored separately from nuclear weapons at 53 facilities. But neither Russia nor the U.S. has a complete inventory of the amount and location of all the highly enriched uranium and plutonium, U.S. experts say. "There's a great deal of anxiety in our community about that, probably in theirs too," said Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R- Ind.), co-sponsor of the most prominent U.S. program to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. "We haven't accounted for everything. So that if something was taken, someone might not know it." Officials also have been unable to confirm the status of the former Soviet Union's portable nuclear explosives, called backpack bombs or suitcase bombs. "There were such bombs, absolutely," said Nikolai Sokov, who was a Russian negotiator for the START II arms control pact signed in 1993. "They should have been dismantled. We do not know for sure if they have been dismantled." Volynkin, the nuclear security chief, told reporters in October that Russia had 84 nuclear devices weighing 30 kilograms or less and that all had been destroyed or put under tight control. Gottemoeller, the former assistant Energy secretary, said the attempted theft of 1.5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a facility in Podolsk in 1992 "was a major wake-up call" for Russian officials. U.S. officials assigned to assist the Russians in the early 1990s "had a problem establishing working relationships," Gottemoeller said, until the Russians "got the fear of God put into them because some of their work force started walking out with pellets of uranium in their pockets." Glasnost, the opening of Soviet society, posed its own challenge. The old security regime was developed with closed borders and nuclear workers who were relatively well paid. This eroded quickly with the superpower's breakup into independent states with open borders and rampant corruption. Quick Fixes For Lax Security The Americans found stunningly lax security at the nuclear facilities they visited: Perimeter fences with holes or gaps. Hinges rusted off doors. Nuclear material stored in lockers with flimsy padlocks. Working with the Russians, they made quick fixes--bricking up windows, installing blast-proof doors, placing radiation detectors at the exits. More comprehensive improvements have been made at a smaller number of facilities--electronic sensors on fences, internal alarms, closed-circuit television monitors and electronic systems to screen visitors. But many of Russia's nuclear weapons storage sites remain off-limits to U.S. officials. The General Accounting Office reported in May that U.S. officials had yet to gain access to 104 of 252 nuclear-site buildings "requiring improved security systems." The Russians' reticence stems in part from nationalist sentiment. "Some people find it humiliating," said Igor Khripunov, who for 21 years was an official with the former Soviet Union's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now is associate director of the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga. "You shouldn't underestimate this sense of national pride. We were this great superpower, and now we have to get money and assistance from the country we considered our adversary." Retired Brig. Gen. Thomas E. Kuenning Jr., who directs the Pentagon's program for reducing threats from the former Soviet Union's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, said in an interview that "Russia's security paranoia" is an impediment. Security Concerns at Civilian Facilities For the Americans, access is required to ensure that U.S. tax dollars are being spent appropriately, Kuenning said. The Russians, in turn, want reciprocal access to sensitive U.S. nuclear facilities. "But we're paying the bill," he said. In his view, reciprocity "is not an issue." Despite "steady, consistent progress," Kuenning said, "there are [security] vulnerabilities that we realize and the Russians realize. And we're working very hard to try to fix" them. John C. Reppert, a former defense attache to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said his greatest worry is vulnerabilities at the civilian Ministry of Atomic Energy test facilities and academic institutions. He said he suspected that security was "at best a padlock and a barbed-wire fence," with fewer guards who are less well trained than those at military locations. (Russia signed an agreement with the U.S. Energy Department in September to provide access to some sensitive Ministry of Atomic Energy facilities that had been closed to the Americans.) Even at the ostensibly premier military facilities, the reliability of the security guards is a constant concern. Some endured months-long gaps in pay in the mid-1990s. Kuenning said pay has improved--it's higher than salaries for ordinary soldiers--and the guard force has a high percentage of officers. But, he added, the tough economic conditions in the remote places where many guards live "add to the challenge" of securing the stockpile. A bipartisan congressional commission headed by former CIA Director John M. Deutch and Sen. Arlen Specter (R- Pa.) detailed some of those challenges in a July 1999 report: "Russia has no reliable inventory of its fissile material, and Russian vulnerability to an 'insider' threat is increased by power outages at Russian nuclear installations, by the need for unpaid guards and technicians to forage for food." The General Accounting Office reported in February that "hundreds of metric tons of [Russian] nuclear material remain unprotected." The report added: "We also observed instances where systems were not operated properly. For example, at one nuclear facility that we visited, an entrance gate to a building containing nuclear material was left open and unattended by guards." When members of the Baker-Cutler task force visited seven of the nuclear facilities in July 2000, they, too, found severe shortcomings. The task force concluded that the republics of the former Soviet Union remained "the most likely place" for terrorists to acquire nuclear materials. "Many of the Russian nuclear sites remain vulnerable to insiders determined to steal enough existing material to make several nuclear weapons and to transport these materials to Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan," the task force's report said. ". . . With the expertise required to make at least a crude nuclear bomb now widely available, it is critical that these materials be secured, neutralized, or eliminated." The U.S. government's capacity to detect diversions of nuclear material also has been undermined by policy shifts within the CIA, several recently retired agents said in interviews. They described specific directives to disband spy missions within the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Germany and other nations where Islamic terrorists are now suspected to have operated. The directives came as the CIA shifted to a post-Cold War posture of spying less on presumed friends and of relying more on high-tech eavesdropping than on informants. "It's had a devastating effect," said one of the ex-agents, who worked inside the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Europe. "We're out of the game. It terrifies me." Presidential Promises A succession of U.S. presidents and members of Congress has agreed upon the need to help the former Soviet Union better safeguard its nuclear materials--and strides have been made. The Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction program, known as Nunn-Lugar after its two original Senate sponsors, has helped deactivate 5,708 nuclear warheads, destroy 435 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 483 air-to-surface missiles, and eliminate hundreds of bombers, submarines and missile launchers. Cost: $4 billion. The Energy Department has spent nearly $6 billion to improve overall security of the nuclear materials, reduce the amount of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium, and combat illicit trafficking in nuclear material. And a State Department program has provided grant money to about 34,000 weapons scientists and other workers to help steer them into civilian research. The U.S. has contributed about $134 million to this international effort. Without viable commercial opportunities, officials fear that some of the 50,000 scientists and engineers who worked to develop the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be tempted by offers from "rogue" states or terrorists. "There still is an environment out there where, despite some improvement in the economy, there are extremely limited choices for many of these people," said a senior State Department official. "Which means that if we can provide them an alternative to a bad guy walking through the door with a suitcase full of money, then this continues to be important." Yet the need to contain the resulting nuclear dangers remains unfulfilled, as highlighted in January by the Baker- Cutler task force report. The task force called for the U.S. to spend up to $30 billion over the next eight to 10 years to prevent the use of a nuclear weapon by terrorists against American troops or citizens. Based on his statements as a candidate, Bush recognized the need to act. Appearing on Nov. 19, 1999, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Bush said: "Under the Nunn-Lugar program, security at many Russian nuclear facilities has been improved and warheads have been destroyed. Even so, the Energy Department warns us that our estimates of Russian nuclear stockpiles could be off by as much as 30%. In other words, a great deal of Russian nuclear material cannot be accounted for. The next president must press for an accurate inventory of all this material. And we must do more. "I will ask the Congress to increase substantially our insistence to dismantle as many of Russia's weapons as possible as quickly as possible." On Nov. 21, 1999, Bush explicitly called for higher funding for the Nunn-Lugar program. "We not only ought to spend that money, we ought to increase that amount of money in the budget to make the world safer," Bush said on NBC's "Meet the Press." Yet last Feb. 28, when Bush submitted his first budget as president, he proposed spending 9% less on the Nunn- Lugar program, reducing the total from $443.4 million to $403 million. And despite candidate Bush's vow to "press for an accurate inventory" of all the nuclear material, the new president's budget proposed significant reductions in related programs that are administered by the Energy Department. Bush proposed reducing by about 11%--from $872.4 million to $773.7 million--the department's overall nonproliferation efforts in the former Soviet Union. (Congress last month approved more money than Bush requested but less than the current funding level.) And Bush included no money in his budget for a U.S.-Russia inventory of all plutonium produced in Russia. The current budget, the last under Clinton, included $500,000 to launch the plutonium program. The administration also is using none of an initial $20-billion emergency package to better secure the Russian nuclear materials. The package is aimed at countering terrorism and assisting in the recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks. And Bush has not asked Congress for any funds for this purpose from an additional $20-billion spending request that is pending on Capitol Hill. Several nuclear security experts criticized Bush's approach. "This is a scandal," said Holdren, the Harvard specialist who chairs an arms control panel of the National Academy of Sciences. "It is far cheaper and more efficient to protect both the knowledge and the material at their source than to try to figure out how to intercept them once they've been manufactured into a nuclear bomb somewhere." Bush, Putin to Talk About Nuclear Threat An administration official said Bush is committed to reducing the threat of nuclear proliferation and expects to discuss the issue with Russia's Putin at this week's summit. "We are actively examining new and expanded efforts in these areas," the official said. The official did not directly address questions submitted by The Times about the contrast between Bush's campaign statements and his spending decisions. Pentagon officials defended Bush's approach to the Nunn-Lugar program. They say he sought the full amount they requested. Clinton raised spending for safeguarding the former Soviet nuclear stockpile throughout his presidency, but he, too, pledged more than he delivered. In his State of the Union address Jan. 19, 1999, Clinton said: "We must expand our work with Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet nations to safeguard nuclear materials and technology so they never fall into the wrong hands. Our balanced budget will increase funding for these critical efforts by almost two-thirds over the next five years." Clinton included spending increases in his two subsequent budget requests--but substantially less than two-thirds, with much of the money going toward programs that were not aimed at securing the nuclear materials. Some former aides say Clinton should have moved more boldly. Matthew Bunn, a leading authority on the Soviet nuclear arsenal who served as an advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the mid-1990s, wrote last year: "President Clinton has said a few words about the high priority of these issues, and then has failed to follow through with the sustained commitments of money, personnel and political attention to get the job done." And Clinton's predecessor, George H.W. Bush, was hesitant to support the Nunn-Lugar initiative in 1991 and 1992. Lugar said that when he and then-Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) approached the administration to use U.S. funds to secure and dismantle nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, Bush was preoccupied with other priorities as the nation emerged from the Persian Gulf War and the president confronted both a recession and his reelection bid. "It was not immediately adopted by the Bush administration as a plan of action," Lugar recalled. "They may not have seen rapidly the efficacy, or even the need, to do this." Cutler, the co-chairman of the task force report issued in January, said the country's leaders and the public remained complacent for a decade. "Before the 11th of September, you couldn't get anybody's attention on nuclear risks, especially the nonproliferation risks," Cutler said. "They thought that if the Cold War was over, it was over. They didn't realize how serious the risks are that the Russian material can either be stolen or sold, how primitive the security is." Staff writer Robyn Dixon in Moscow and researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Tuesday November 13 1:16 PM ET State Dept. Mail Bldg. Has Anthrax By GEORGE GEDDA, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Anthrax contamination turned up in eight of 55 tests taken from a State Department remote mail facility in Virginia, officials reported Tuesday, a strong indication that a spore-laden letter remains to be found. Dr. Steven Ostroff, an anthrax expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites), said that ``based on the bulk of the evidence'' available, the agency believes there's a tainted letter yet to be discovered in the State Department system. One State Department mail handler became ill with inhalation anthrax last month, a case that officials speculated resulted from cross-contamination with a letter mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Officials have located three tainted letters nationwide, one each sent to Daschle, NBC newsman Tom Brokaw and the New York Post. They also theorize that an as-yet undiscovered letter was mailed to a Florida tabloid publishing company where two employees were stricken with the disease, one fatally. By CDC count, 17 people have been stricken with anthrax in an outbreak of bioterrorism, 10 of the inhalation form of the disease and the balance with a less serious skin type. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that eight samples out of 55 that were collected from the agency's mail facility in Sterling, Va., tested positive for anthrax. He said two of the samples were obtained from two separate mail sorters and the six others from a third sorter. Boucher said the results are important because they support the theory that a letter like the one sent to Tom Daschle has moved through the mail system. ``We are now proceeding to look at all the mail that we had held up, frozen, sealed off in mailrooms in this building, in annexes and around the world,'' he said. Boucher noted that the State Department closed its mail system Oct. 24 and notified posts around the world to seal and shut down pouch mail. Ostroff, on a conference call with reporters, said, ``We have said for quite a while that one of the potential explanations for the inhalation anthrax case in that (State Department) employee was that there was an unrecognized additional letter that went through that system.'' He added, ``We think that based on the bulk of the evidence that's available to us the first explanation is more likely.'' The State Department informed all employees of the test results at the Sterling site in a two-page ``department notice.'' The notice said that as soon as the U.S. Postal Service facility in the Brentwood area of Washington was discovered to have anthrax contamination, the department shut down its domestic and overseas mail systems. This was done because of the risk of contamination at the Sterling facility, which receives most of its mail from Brentwood. The notice also recalled that all mail handlers were placed on prophylactic antibiotics. Except for the Sterling facility, which has been shut down, ``We are not at risk by working in our buildings,'' the notice said. It said that existing low level contamination does not pose any risk of inhalation anthrax. ``We are cleaning all our mail rooms proactively, both domestic and overseas, to be certain that we are doing what we can to best protect our employees.'' http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011113/us/attacks_anthrax_5.html

Tuesday November 13 3:57 PM ET Bush Promises Warheads Reduction By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites) pledged Tuesday to reduce the United States' long-range nuclear arsenal by two-thirds or more over the next decade, to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads. Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) said he would ``try to respond in kind.'' Emerging from their first White House summit, Bush said his decision would leave the United States with a supply of warheads ``fully consistent with American security.'' At a joint news conference, the two leaders said they had found common ground on numerous issues - the war on terrorism and the shape of a future government in Afghanistan (news - web sites) among them. But they said disagreements remain over American plans to develop a missile defense shield, adding they would continue discussions on the subject over the next two days in Texas. ``The position of Russia remains unchanged,'' Putin said of his government's objection to scrapping a 1972 treaty that bars national missile defenses. Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) told reporters ``there will not be an agreement soon'' on missile defense. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) said, ``Don't expect any particular agreement at any particular time.'' In remarks that relegated the Cold War to a distant memory, Bush said the discussions with Putin herald ``a new day in the long history of Russian-American relations, a day of progress and a day of hope.'' Putin said, ``We intend to dismantle conclusively the vestiges of the Cold War.'' Bush greeted Putin at midmorning in the Oval Office, the fourth time the two men have sat down together. They lunched in the mansion's Blue Room and then addressed reporters in the East Room from two brand-new lecterns specially designed for Bush and built by hand by the White House Communications Agency. Bush's announcement of unilateral cuts redeemed a pledge he made during last year's presidential campaign. The United States currently has roughly 7,000 intercontinental nuclear warheads. Russia has an estimated 5,800. The president also said he would work to ``end the application'' of Cold War-era legislation that restricted trade. The president said he and Putin also had agreed to support a United Nations (news - web sites) call for a ``broadly based and multiethnic'' government in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban. ``Russia and America share the same threat and share the same resolve'' to battle terrorism, he said. ``We will fight and defeat terrorist networks wherever'' they exist. The two presidents found one more thing to agree on - support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Bush said the Pakistani leader ``deserves our nation's support,'' and Putin said a few moments later, ``We agree with this.'' Musharraf has led his country firmly into the coalition against the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. Putin made clear he continues to oppose Bush's plan for a missile defense system. Bush came to office pledging to develop a shield, even if it meant scrapping the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty negotiated with the Soviet Union. In deference to Putin's assistance in the war against terrorism, though, the administration recently announced a delay in some missile defense tests, saying it wanted to avoid bumping up against the treaty's prohibitions. Bush's comment about trade restrictions referred to the 1974 Jackson-Vanik legislation. Designed to lift emigration curbs on Jews and other minorities, it forced the Soviet Union to permit mass departures in order to qualify for trade privileges. ``Russia is fundamentally a different place,'' Bush said. Because of progress on Jewish migration, he said, ``my administration will work with Congress to end the application of Jackson-Vanik to Russia.'' Bush said he and Putin had spent considerable time discussing the situation in Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban abandoned the capital city of Kabul overnight. Bush said the withdrawal signaled that ``we're making great progress in our objective, and that is to tighten the net and eventually bring al-Qaida to justice and at the same time deal with the government that's been harboring them.'' Bush made clear he hasn't changed his views on the ABM Treaty, Putin's concerns notwithstanding. ``I'm convinced the treaty is outdated and we have to move beyond it,'' he said. He added he expects the two sides will continue their discussions on the topic. He and Putin are scheduled to meet again Wednesday and again Thursday at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush said he had adopted a new approach on arms control, one based on trust that does not require ``endless hours of arms control discussions.'' ``I looked the man in the eye and shook his hand. But if you need to write it down on a piece of paper I'll be glad to do that. We don't need arms control negotiations to reduce our weaponry in a significant way.'' Bush said repeatedly that the northern alliance forces in Afghanistan have pledged they would not occupy Kabul, the capital. Asked whether northern alliance leaders should be treated favorably because of their presence in the city, Bush said, ``there is no preferential place at the bargaining table. All people will be treated the same.'' http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011113/pl/us_russia_62.html