BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: Ron Davies
Date: 11 Nov 04 - 05:48 PM

Smedly--

Congratulations on the word "obloviating". Bet you don't get a chance to use it often.

As to the article---you're still, after all this time, not reading carefully

It is not only on MSNBC (link posted by Amos), but also in the Washington Post.

Do you believe Senator Domenici said what I quoted---yes or no?

Simple question--simple answer.

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: GUEST,Smedly
Date: 12 Nov 04 - 11:22 PM

RD:

I have found a link to the article you were to sloppy and lazy to put in your sub standard post.

Basically the article says "Bush inherited a train wreck from Clinton"

If Clinton had done his job when the previous Al Quaeda attacks happened there would have been no 9/11.

Yes I believe Senator Domenici said what you quoted.


Do you believe this part of the article?:"
It was Libya's entire nuclear weapons program, bought over a decade for $100 million and change from Khan. On Dec. 19, three months before, Libya had become the first country since 1995 to pull up a nuclear program by its roots -- a striking accomplishment for Bush and Blair."

Do you believe Einhorn, assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation under Clinton said "We were sniffing on the wrong trail through much of the '90s."?

Do you believe Kerry said "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages — all of this is contrary to laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions"?

Do you believe Kerry said "I wonder where all that black hair went"?

Smedly

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: catlova
Date: 19 Jul 05 - 10:50 AM

Bush administration plans production of deadly plutonium-238 for "secret missions" by William J. Broad, The New York Times; June 27, 2005

The Bush administration is planning the government's first production of plutonium 238 since the cold war, stirring debate over the risks and benefits of the deadly material. The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer.

Federal officials say the program would produce a total of 330 pounds over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling site outside Idaho Falls some 100 miles to the west and upwind of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Officials say the program could cost $1.5 billion and generate more than 50,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.   Federal officials say the program would produce a total of 330 pounds of plutonium 238 over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling site outside Idaho Falls some 100 miles to the west and upwind of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.Officials say the program could cost $1.5 billion and generate more than 50,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any details. But in the past, it has powered espionage devices. "The real reason we're starting production is for national security," Timothy A. Frazier, head of radioisotope power systems at the Energy Department, said in a recent interview. He vigorously denied that any of the classified missions would involve nuclear arms, satellites or weapons in space. The laboratory is a source of pride and employment for many residents in the Idaho Falls area. But the secrecy is adding to unease in Wyoming, where environmentalists are scrutinizing the production plan -- made public late Friday -- and considering whether to fight it. In 1964, a rocket failure led to the destruction of a navigation satellite powered by plutonium 238, spreading radioactivity around the globe and starting a debate over the event's health effects.

They say the production effort is a potential threat to nearby ecosystems, including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and the area around Jackson Hole, famous for its billionaires, celebrities and weekend cowboys, including Vice President Dick Cheney. "It's completely wrapped in the flag," said Mary Woollen-Mitchell, executive director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, a group based in Jackson Hole. "They absolutely won't let on" about the missions. "People are starting to pay attention," she said of the production plan. "On the street, just picking up my kids at school, they're getting keyed up that something is in the works."

Plutonium 238 has no central role in nuclear arms. Instead, it is valued for its steady heat, which can be turned into electricity. Nuclear batteries made of it are best known for powering spacecraft that go where sunlight is too dim to energize solar cells. For instance, they now power the Cassini probe exploring Saturn and its moons. Federal and private experts unconnected to the project said the new plutonium would probably power devices for conducting espionage on land and under the sea. Even if no formal plans now exist to use the plutonium in space for military purposes, these experts said that the material could be used by the military to power compact spy satellites that would be hard for adversaries to track, evade or destroy.

"It's going to be a tough world in the next one or two decades, and this may be needed," said a senior federal scientist who helps the military plan space missions and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the possibility that he would contradict federal policies. "Technologically, it makes sense." Early in the nuclear era, the government became fascinated by plutonium 238 and used it regularly to make nuclear batteries that worked for years or decades. Scores of them powered satellites, planetary probes and spy devices, at times with disastrous results. In 1964, a rocket failure led to the destruction of a navigation satellite powered by plutonium 238, spreading radioactivity around the globe and starting a debate over the event's health effects. In 1965, high in the Himalayas, an intelligence team caught in a blizzard lost a plutonium-powered device meant to spy on China. And in 1968, an errant weather satellite crashed into the Pacific, but federal teams managed to recover its plutonium battery intact from the Santa Barbara Channel, off California.

Such accidents cooled enthusiasm for the batteries. But federal agencies continued to use them for a more limited range of missions, including those involving deep-space probes and top-secret devices for tapping undersea cables.

In 1997, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepared to launch its Cassini probe of Saturn, hundreds of protesters converged on its Florida spaceport, arguing that an accident could rupture the craft's nuclear batteries and condemn thousands of people to death by cancer. Plutonium 238 is hundreds of times more radioactive than the kind of plutonium used in nuclear arms, plutonium 239. Medical experts agree that inhaling even a speck poses a serious risk of lung cancer. But federal experts say that the newest versions of the nuclear batteries are made to withstand rupture into tiny particles and that the risk of human exposure is extraordinarily low. Today, the United States makes no plutonium 238 and instead relies on aging stockpiles or imports from Russia. By agreement with the Russians, it cannot use the imported material -- some 35 pounds since the end of the cold war -- for military purposes.

With its domestic stockpile running low, Washington now wants to resume production. Though it last made plutonium 238 in the 1980's at the government's Savannah River plant in South Carolina, it now wants to move such work to the Idaho National Laboratory and consolidate all the nation's plutonium 238 activities there, including efforts now at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. By centralizing everything in Idaho, the Energy Department hopes to increase security and reduce the risks involved in transporting the radioactive material over highways.

Late Friday, the department posted a 500-page draft environmental impact statement on the plan at www.consolidationeis.doe.gov. The public has 60 days to respond. Mr. Frazier said the department planned to weigh public reaction and complete the regulatory process by late this year, and to finish the plan early in 2006. The president would then submit it to Congress for approval, he said. The work requires no international assent. The Idaho National Laboratory, founded in 1949 for atomic research, stretches across 890 square miles of southeastern Idaho. The Big Lost River wanders its length. The site is dotted with 450 buildings and 52 reactors -- more than at any other place -- most of them shut down. It has long wrestled with polluted areas and recently sought to set new standards in environmental restoration.

New plutonium facilities there would take five years to build and cost about $250 million, Mr. Frazier said. The operations budget would run to some $40 million annually over 30 years, he said, for a total cost of nearly $1.5 billion. An existing reactor there would make the plutonium. Mr. Frazier said the goal was to start production by 2012 and have the first plutonium available by 2013. When possible, Mr. Frazier said, the plutonium would be used not only for national security but also for deep-space missions, reducing dependence on Russian supplies.

Since late last year, the Energy Department has tried to reassure citizens living around the proposed manufacturing site of the plan's necessity and safety. But political activists in Wyoming have expressed frustration at what they call bureaucratic evasiveness regarding serious matters. "It's the nastiest of the nasty," Ms. Woollen-Mitchell said of plutonium 238. Early this year, she succeeded in learning some preliminary details of the plan from the Energy Department. Mr. Frazier provided her with a document that showed that production over 30 years would produce 51,590 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

He also referred to the continuing drain on the government's national security stockpile, saying the known missions by the end of this decade would require 55 pounds of plutonium for 10 to 15 power systems. Those uses, he said, would leave virtually no plutonium for future classified missions. Ms. Woollen-Mitchell was unswayed. In January she told the Energy Department that so much information about the plan remained hidden that it had "given us serious pause."

The Energy Department is courting Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free because it has flexed its political muscle before. Starting in late 1999, financed by wealthy Jackson Hole residents like Harrison Ford, it fought to stop the Idaho lab from burning plutonium-contaminated waste in an incinerator and forced the lab to investigate alternatives. In the recent interview, Mr. Frazier said he planned to talk to the group on Tuesday and expressed hope of winning people over.

"I don't know that I'll be able to make them perfectly comfortable," he said, "but they know that the department is willing to listen and talk and take their comments into consideration." "We have a good case," Mr. Frazier added, saying the department could show that the Idaho plan "can be done safely with very minimal environmental impacts."

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prol
From: freda underhill
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 10:53 AM

Showdown looms over nuclear deal; July 21, 2005

Washington: The US Senate has approved US-backed loans to build nuclear power plants in China. It rejected 62-37 an amendment that would have barred the US Export-Import Bank from granting $US5 billion ($6.6 billion) in loans for China to build nuclear plants. It was a win for Westinghouse Electric, which is bidding to build four huge nuclear reactors in China in a deal the Bush Administration backs.

The Senate vote sets up a fight with the House of Representatives, which voted to block the deal that legislators said would subsidise China. The Oklahoma Republican senator Tom Coburn said: "It seems insane that we would give a subsidy to finance the export of American technology." But the Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum said his state could benefit from some of the up to 5000 US jobs created if Westinghouse got the deal.

Reuters

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prol
From: freda underhill
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 11:01 AM

Pentagon report stresses limits of China's military threat
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: July 20 2005 03:00 | Last updated: July 20 2005 03:00

China could pose a future military threat to other Asian countries but its current ability to project power beyond its periphery is "limited", the Pentagon said yesterday. In its long-awaited annual report on the Chinese military, the Pentagon concluded that China was increasing its efforts to prepare for a conflict over Taiwan, including taking longer-term measures to defend itself from other countries who could get involved in a conflict over Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.

"We see China facing a strategic crossroads," the Pentagon report said. "Questions remain about the basic choices China's leaders will make as China's power and influence grow, particularly its military power." The report said the Chinese military was focusing in the short term on modernising its ability to fight short, high-intensity conflicts along its periphery. But it said the People's Liberation Army was also taking longer-term steps to increase its defences against the potential involvement of other countries in any conflict between China and Taiwan.

Those measures include expanding its arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles, its submarine fleet, and purchasing advanced aircraft.

"Over the long term, if current trends persist, PLA capabilities could pose a credible threat to other modern militaries operating in the region," the report said.

The tone of the report echoes remarks by Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, who when speaking to a June meeting of Asian defence ministers in Singapore questioned why China was dramatically increasing its defence budget when "no nation threatens China". The report comes on the heels of comments by a senior Chinese general last week who suggested that China would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in any conflict with the US over Taiwan.

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: Metchosin
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 11:55 AM

hmmm......interesting. I read the other day that China now holds the paper on 43% of America's massive debt. I wonder if the 6.6 billion in loans to China is a means to somehow loosen a finger of China on America's balls?

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prol
From: freda underhill
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 12:11 PM

the dangers of capitalism - being $crewed by the communi$ts.

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 08:46 PM

This thread should be titled "Trolling for Conservatives..." The conservative faction of mudcat is wise not to rise to the bait on this one, despite the somber theme.

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: dianavan
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 10:20 PM

Bait?

I think that Conservatives cannot refute the comments on this thread or they would.

Are you saying that China does not have the U.S. by the balls?

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: Kaleea
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 11:45 PM

Try going to your local newspaper & do some research on all the countries which have detonated nuclear warheads. Go ahead, I double dog dare you. Go back at least 35 years. You will find, that there will be a teenie, tiny maybe one inch (including title of article) sentence or two in the back of one of the back sections saying that USSRnowRussia/Georgia/et. al., France, China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, Libbya (just to name a few), or whoever detonated a nuclear warhead at such place on such date. Now, do some addition. Where did all that plutonium come from?

China makes most of our products now. Jobs have been shipped over there for years. And India, & wherever. Everytime my SBC DSL goes on the blink, I call the toll free number & get somebody in India. No, I'm not kidding. The factories where all our parts, components, etc. come from know all about our stuff. Stuff like electronics. Parts for TVs, computers, Jets, weapons, & lots more stuff--really techie stuff. Like the radios & computer parts for the weaponry & communication equipment & most all vehicles which our Military personnel uses in Iraq & Afghanistan. The personnel which actually has the correct equipment, that is. Some of which was purchased from wallyworld, radioshack & the like by the families of the said personnel & mailed over to them, "over there."   Ok, a lot of the stuff. If they're making our stuff, they know most all of our "secrets." Duh. We just love to share with all of our allies we "trade" with. We give them our jobs, our money, and we get--stuff.

Oh, I almost forgot--the American company that makes the bullet proof vests said the vests might degrade over time. Oh, and they might fail to function correctly even if new.
Where did they get the stuff the vests are made with?

Subject: RE: BS: Bush Dangerously Wrong on Nuclear Non-Prolifer
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jul 05 - 11:53 PM

Whether China has the USA by the balls or not doesn't have anything to do with the intent of the originator of this thread. The purpose was to goad or lure conservatives into a thread to bash them. That's trolling, irrespective of any opinion concerning China, or the fate of Russia's nuclear material, or the price of eggs. Looks to me like the conservative Mudcat members realized what was about and wisely let this thread slip off the page.

That said, there were some pertinent issues that could've been discussed in a rational and enlightened manner if the initial tone of the thread had not been established as being overtly aggressive.