U.S. Response I:  States Rush to Assess Terrorism Threat, Define Strategies

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — With little fanfare, the U.S. Homeland Security Department has launched a program that will be crucial in determining future federal funding to state and local emergency responders and could be a key step toward the creation of a national terrorism threat assessment ― something that department critics see as the long-overdue cornerstone of a more effective counterterrorism program.

In a process launched July 1, state homeland security agencies are to submit to the department their statewide assessments of the threat of terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction.  These reports, expected also to include the states’ planned strategies for preventing and dealing with such attacks, are due by Dec. 31 to the department’s Office for Domestic Preparedness, formerly part of the Justice Department.

Among other uses, the data will be provided to the DHS Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, which is working on a national threat assessment, a DHS official said yesterday.

The information will also determine how the federal government distributes billions of dollars in funding to state and local emergency responders.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last week that he expects “about $7.5 billion” yearly to be available to state and local governments over the short term, including ODP emergency responder grants, ODP Urban Area Security Initiative funds and Assistance to Firefighters grants from DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.

About $4 billion in DHS funding will be available this fiscal year to state and local governments, according to DHS, with the bulk of the money channeled through ODP’s emergency responder grants.

In terms of contributing to a better national picture of the terrorist threat, the statewide assessments are a “great first step, and if that’s where it ends, it’s of little value,” said PSComm President John Cohen, who advises state and local governments on homeland security matters.

Cohen contributed to a recent Progressive Policy Institute report criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of homeland security (see GSN, July 24).  Among the report’s recommendations was a call for urgent work to complete a national threat assessment, which observers on all sides have called crucial to better deployment of resources to protect the United States against a terrorist attack.

Interviewed this week, Cohen credited DHS with taking some steps toward a comprehensive threat assessment ― ODP, for example, requires cities to conduct threat assessments before they can receive the bulk of funding they are awarded under the office’s Urban Area Security Initiative ― but said the process should be broader in scope and “should have been done about a year and a half ago.”

“Why has it taken 20 months for this to start? … Now that we’ve started it, is the abbreviated time frame going to impact the accuracy?” he asked.

The DHS official acknowledged that Dec. 31 is a “pretty tight deadline” but said the new urgency reflects changes in the homeland security environment since 1999, when the first assessments were submitted to ODP.

“It’s a lot different than the last time around. … It wasn’t a top priority within the states, let’s just say, to get these things done,” said the official, citing changes such as new fears of a WMD attack following the September 2001 attacks on the United States and the resulting availability of new funds for counterterrorism efforts.

New Focus for DHS, States

In one sense, this year’s plans are merely the states’ latest submissions in a process that has existed for four years, but DHS and state officials indicated the process has taken on a new national importance with the 2001 attacks and the resulting creation of DHS early this year.

The DHS official said ODP was already seeking an “overarching” assessment process with the 1999 submissions but that many states viewed the process as more narrowly tied to grant money at the time.

State officials, including Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency Director David Sanko, indicated this week that DHS has made it clear this year that it is seeking an overall picture of counterterrorism needs and strategies, not just data to be used in determining grants.

Pennsylvania is submitting “a much more comprehensive document” than in the past, according to Sanko, who called it “encouraging” that ODP appears set to begin basing funding on threat, rather than on widely criticized population-based formulas now in use.

ODP has provided handbooks to states and local jurisdictions to help them navigate the process, and state and local submissions of data are coordinated and standardized via an online system created by ODP for the purpose.  Local jurisdictions are to provide most of the data, submitting precise information about sites perceived as potential targets, the likely outcomes of attacks on such sites and local agencies’ resources for responding to an attack.

“Never before,” according to the state handbook, “have these precise requirements been as well identified for planning, organizing, equipping, training and exercising local jurisdictions and states to respond to a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism incident.”  The local jurisdiction handbook indicates that local risk assessments being carried out for the state submissions constitute “the first step in ensuring nationwide preparedness.”

“It’s actually pretty good,” Cohen said of ODP’s guidance to states and municipalities in preparing the assessments.  He said ODP is providing more detail to state and local authorities and better guiding them through the assessment and strategy development processes.

If jurisdictions follow the steps laid out by ODP, Cohen said, “We’ll have taken a major step in doing a national threat assessment.”

DHS Accused of Slowness, Lack of Overall Strategy

While some critics acknowledge the state assessment process is a step forward, many continue to charge DHS with moving too slowly on the national assessment, lacking a discernible overarching strategy for distributing resources to counter terrorism and failing to consult adequately with state and local authorities in its bid to assess the WMD threat nationwide.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Jamie Metzl, who directed a study released in June that indicated U.S. emergency responders are largely unprepared for a terrorist attack, said federal authorities “keep confusing self-assessment with national standards” (see GSN, June 30).

State and local authorities, according to Metzl, must be brought into the process of defining risk and need, not simply asked to provide data in a standardized format.  What is needed, he said, is for “everybody to come together and develop a national framework of what does it mean to be prepared.”

Cohen warned that this year’s process will be of little value without subsequent feedback to state and local jurisdictions and frequent updates in the years to come.

He said the federal government should “blend” the kinds of data being collected in the current effort with broader intelligence and other kinds of information to establish a national list prioritizing potential terrorist targets, which would then be “bounced back” to state and local agencies to help them not only to prevent or respond to an attack, but also to conduct their assessments and develop strategies.

“Part of the problem,” said Cohen, “is that you have ODP distributing a survey and asking for answers to very specific questions so that they can qualify the level of preparedness, without telling anybody really clearly what it is they’re being prepared to confront.”

“Somebody, somewhere, knows what the risk is that we face in defined terms, but that hasn’t been shared with the people who are out there on the front lines,” Cohen said.

Confusion Apparent in the States

State homeland security officials indicated various approaches to preparing their submissions to ODP, with some confusion apparent as to the nature of the undertaking and the precise requirements.

Although Missouri Homeland Security Director Tim Daniels credited ODP with providing “a lot of guidance” and a “very tightly controlled template,” some other states’ homeland security offices said they will mainly repackage existing data, while others said they intend to use the federal template only as a loose guideline for their assessments.

The DHS official said all states are expected to use ODP’s data collection system so the information received by DHS is in a standard format and, therefore, usable in national planning efforts.

In addition, some states have expressed frustration at the new format for submissions to ODP, according to observers familiar with the process.  Besides the handbooks it provided to state and local authorities, ODP has been conducting regional conferences on the process and is making teams of advisers available to states and local jurisdictions.

It is unclear whether all states will be able to meet the Dec. 31 deadline for submitting the assessments and strategies.  While stopping short of Cohen’s characterization of the six months allotted as an “abbreviated” schedule, Pennsylvania’s Sanko called the time frame “aggressive.”  Officials from other states said the time allotted is sufficient.

“It’s a very big job. … It’s critically important that it get done,” Sanko said in defense of the deadline.

Better Grant Distribution Could Be Ahead

At a conference last week in Arlington, Va., Ridge linked this year’s state assessments with a bid to base federal grants for responders on locally driven assessments, rather than on the unpopular population-based formulas.

“Our department has asked the states and the locals to submit statewide homeland security plans … so that, from the 2005 budget forward, the money can be expended consistent with a plan that is state-coordinated but driven from the local government up,” the secretary told emergency personnel from local agencies around the country.

“We want those plans by the end of the year, so that, in future years, we can make those allocations and distributions to the state, knowing where those dollars are going to be invested and knowing that those decisions were made from local government on up,” Ridge said.

Criticism of the current formula for funding emergency responders came to a head at a July 17 hearing of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee.  Several representatives, as well as invited speakers, criticized the current approach.

“Two things are clear:  First responders are underfunded, and a better process must be put in place to coordinate and disseminate these funds,” Representative Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said at the hearing.

At last week’s conference, Ridge stressed the importance of locally driven counterterrorism work, as opposed to state-controlled efforts.  Amid debate between states and local governments over who should get the bulk of federal funding for homeland security, he threatened that states that are slow to fund local jurisdictions could see their funds withheld.

“We will make sure that it gets down to you, even to the extent if we ― and I don’t think we’re going to have to do this, but one of the things you do have in this town is you have a little leverage.  And if we said to the governors, ‘You don’t get your 20 or 25 percent until the other 75 percent is distributed,’ I suspect they’d send it out the door pretty quickly,” Ridge said.

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U.S. Response II:  Homeland Security’s ‘Intractable Problem’

By Siobhan Gorman

National Journal

Every day, Gil Kerlikowske looks out over one of the country’s largest terrorism targets.  From his office window, Seattle’s police chief sees two sports stadiums and one of America’s busiest seaports.

In the back of his mind, he thinks about the Seattle area’s close calls: “Millennium Bomber” Ahmed Ressam in 1999, and more recently, suspected Qaeda trainer and Seattle resident James Ujaama, as well as others still under investigation.  Then there was the news about a year and a half ago that a laptop computer found in a cave in Tora Bora contained photos of Seattle.  “I was shaken, to say the very least,” he says.

Now Kerlikowske is being shaken by what he calls “a perfect storm” of budget cuts, new homeland-security duties, and rising crime.  And while Seattle has received $11 million in federal homeland-security grants for equipment and training, the police chief’s problem isn’t lack of training so much as lack of people to train.  And without more officers to assume increased homeland duties, he says, ultimately, “the [security] outcome will be that nothing will have changed.”  Or the outcome could change for the worse.  Before he retired last month, Seattle’s local FBI chief Charles Mandigo issued a report warning that the reduction in police forces made the area more attractive to terrorists.

In fact, even as federal dollars start to roll in, many states and localities are experiencing homeland security’s cruel twist on the all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go dilemma: They have a lot of shiny new equipment, but can’t afford to hire anyone to use it.  And regardless of whose responsibility it is — federal, state, or local — to fill the gap, the budget deficit is translating into a homeland-security capacity deficit.  “Without question, the single largest challenge is that we are unable to really hire people to support a lot of the federal equipment we’re being asked to deploy,” says Clifford Ong, director of Indiana’s Counterterrorism and Security Council.  “That is an intractable problem for us.”

In Seattle, a $60 million deficit meant the loss of 75 positions from the police department — 25 officers and 50 support staff.  Though the cuts were achieved through attrition, not layoffs, they still leave Kerlikowske down 25 officers — not to mention the 30 additional he had hoped to hire.  And Kerlikowske is not alone.  Los Angeles estimates it has 1,000 fewer police officers than it needs.  New York, under union pressure, relented on plans to cut more than 200 firefighting jobs, but still shut down six fire stations.

No comprehensive national numbers are available on this state and local “homeland-security deficit.”  The U.S Conference of Mayors surveyed its members during the country’s last bout with an orange alert, and found that cities collectively spent $70 million additional each week under that elevated threat level.  House Democrats are distributing a survey to mayors in their districts to gauge their “hometown-security” needs.  They plan to release the results next month.  Meanwhile, the International Association of Fire Fighters says that firefighter staffing levels in two-thirds of American cities are below national standards.

The answer, says Seattle’s Kerlikowske, is federal help.  “There has to be a point where, in this small number of [high-target] cities, that federal dollars have to be made [available] for personnel,” he says.  He has plenty of company in that sentiment.  Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley says if the federal government wants to beef up security quickly, then the federal government has to pay for a substantial part of the increased capacity demanded by the new homeland mission.  He quips that homeland security has become “this new unfounded mandate called ‘the common defense.’”

While homeland security is not entirely unfunded, the federal government has made it clear that under no circumstances is it going to get into the expensive proposition of hiring local police and firefighters.  “The bottom line is, we have a responsibility to equip them, to help train them, to exercise them, to help them plan,” says Josh Filler, director of the Homeland Security Department’s Office of State and Local Coordination.  “The basic responsibility to hire police and firefighters, we believe, rests with the state and local levels.”

Filler emphatically points out that the federal government is spending an “unprecedented” amount of money on state and local homeland-security needs, which is true.  So far, the department has provided $4.4 billion, and another $3.5 billion should be on the way in the next fiscal year.  State and local officials acknowledge that the federal government has done a relatively good job of funding bioterror preparations, emergency response equipment, and to some degree, training.

Worried that homeland-security dollars will get funneled off to fill other budget gaps, the federal government has insisted that homeland grants go to programs that are primarily, if not exclusively, oriented to homeland security.  That means no money for salaries, fire trucks or infrastructure.  The rationale sounds reasonable on its face, but unfortunately, homeland security doesn’t work that way.

Indiana’s Ong is struggling to balance the federal requirement to spend the state’s money on homeland security with the reality that layering homeland-security money on a crumbling infrastructure is not going to do much good.  “There are a lot of challenges being thrown to the intelligence-gathering community, the public health community, and the emergency management community,” he says.  “That requires the organizational capacity that just isn’t there.  It’s not enough to say to people, ‘You need to find a way of assimilating these duties into your existing budget.’  It just doesn’t happen.”

Filler acknowledges the fuzzy line between what is and isn’t homeland security, and for now, he is using the I-know-it-when-I-see-it rule.  That’s both good news and bad news for cash-strapped states.  The good news is that federal money can probably be used for programs that state officials have been assuming are off-limits.  Installing targeted information-systems software, Filler says, probably would qualify.  But beefing up 911 systems (which have proven unreliable in Washington, D.C., for example), would have a harder time qualifying, he says.  “This is not just money for generic public safety.”  The bad news is that personnel and infrastructure, a top priority for local homeland-security officials, are a no-go.

Experts such as John Cohen, a cop-turned-homeland-security-consultant, get red-faced when policy makers try to separate day-to-day safety activities from homeland security.  Those everyday activities provide the foundation for all homeland-security efforts, Cohen says.  How can you expect that Washington, D.C.’s emergency responders will be able to don their new protective gear and run off to the site of a terrorist attack when the 911 emergency response system is repeatedly on the fritz?

What’s needed is to “reorient the philosophy at the federal level,” Cohen says.  “Until we move away from this flawed philosophy that homeland security is something adjunct [to] or separate from the day-to-day public safety or public health activities, we’re not going to truly benefit from all these millions of federal dollars.”

The Homeland Security Department’s priorities have relegated state and local duties almost entirely to cleaning up rather than preventing, says Rob Atkinson, vice president of the centrist Democrat think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute.  While Filler says he’d consider funding information systems, Atkinson contends that the people he’s spoken with at the department couldn’t even persuade the powers-that-be to squeeze $20 million into the 2004 budget for a pilot project to link federal, state, and local information systems.  (This week, though, the department did announce support for two smaller information-sharing pilot projects in Florida and the mid-Atlantic region.)

“We can’t expect state and local law enforcement to win this war with the current tools they are using,” he says.  “That’s going to require a significant investment to modernize the tools.  States can’t do it on their own.  ... It absolutely increases our vulnerability.”  Without federal chaperoning, Atkinson says, the country will slowly evolve a patchwork of state and local information systems that can’t talk to each other.

Budget shortfalls are stunting other forward-thinking homeland-security efforts.  States and localities that are living in the budgetary moment don’t have the time or money to think and invest long term.

California, says Rick Martinez, the state’s chief deputy for homeland security, has focused its spending largely on equipment.  If he had more money, Martinez says, he’d put it toward personnel, infrastructure, long-term training facilities, long-term strategizing and a unified communications system for emergency responders.

In Miami-Dade County in Florida, Homeland Security Director Joseph R. Pinon says he’d love to have 20 people assigned just to assessing the threat.  “I have a whole list of things that if I had the ability to do, we would feel a lot more secure; but we don’t have that luxury,” Pinon said.  “Could we have it?  Yes.  We just spent how many billions of dollars on the war?  It’s not that it’s unreachable, but it’s politically incorrect.”

With an ongoing home-front war on terrorism, lack of long-term planning may be the most dangerous budget casualty of all.  It puts all levels of government in a state of perpetual catch-up that emphasizes response over prevention.  And that’s not the best recipe for out-thinking terrorists.

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Iraq I:  Iraq Survey Group Set to Release Report Next Month

British officials have said that the Iraq Survey Group, which is currently conducting the WMD hunt in Iraq, has found enough evidence to release a report of its findings next month, the London Times reported today (see GSN, Aug. 4).

The group’s report is expected to include evidence of a long-term biological weapons program, the Times reported.  Coalition forces have also received a large amount of evidence from Iraqi scientists as to how former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought to hide his WMD efforts from U.N. inspectors, British officials said (Michael Evans, London Times, Aug. 8).

The group’s findings are also expected to be included in a report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the British government is planning to publish in September, according to the London Independent.  The British intelligence service MI6 believes the group’s findings will help to support a now-disputed report the British government released in last September on Iraq’s WMD programs (Sengupta/Waugh, London Independent, Aug. 8).

White House Officials Repeated Africa-Uranium Claim

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported today that senior Bush administration officials reiterated the now-disputed claim that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Africa shortly before, and then after, U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address (see GSN, Aug. 5).

Bush aides have said that the claim was included into Bush’s address because of miscommunications between the CIA and White House staff, according to the Post.  In the month that the State of the Union was delivered, however, the claim was also included in two White House documents and in speeches and articles prepared by four senior White House officials.

In January, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz all made the claim at various times, according to the Post.  In addition, the African uranium claim was also included in a report sent to Congress as part of the Bush administration’s request for authorization to use military force against Iraq and in a publicly released report on Iraq’s weapons concealment activities, the Post reported.

The inclusion of the Africa uranium claim in the State of the Union address “made people below feel comfortable using it as well,” White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said yesterday.  There was some “strategic coordination” as to what claims should have been included in statements against Iraq, Bartlett said, adding, “I don’t know of any specific talking points to say that this is supposed to be used” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 8).

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Iraq II:  Al-Qaeda Links With Baghdad Were Exaggerated

By Peter H. Stone

National Journal

As criticism over the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction continues, a new wave of accusations seems ready to break — this time, over complaints that in its efforts to sell the war, the White House also hyped claims about the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al-Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.  The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

“Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al-Qaeda because they were mortal enemies,” said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall.  “Saddam would have seen al-Qaeda as a threat, and al-Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated.”

Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking al-Qaeda to Iraq was overblown.

“Anyone who followed al-Qaeda for a living would not have considered Iraq to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about,” said Roger Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top aide to cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke.  “I’d argue that Iraq would be in the third tier.”  By contrast, Cressey said, Iran would rate in “the top tier.”

And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the al-Qaeda connection.

Generally, these and other former intelligence officials who talked to National Journal believed that the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein.  But the analysts questioned the war’s timing and wondered whether the attack should have come before the battle against al-Qaeda was sufficiently far along.

In the reviews that the Senate and the House Intelligence panels are conducting into the accuracy of prewar intelligence, the claims on Iraq and al-Qaeda are also a topic of inquiry.  Republican leaders of those committees have generally defended the administration’s prewar assessment of al-Qaeda-Iraq links.  Democrats, however, have been skeptical.

“I have never believed that the prewar links between al-Qaeda and Iraq were very strong,” said Representative Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who voted in favor of the war last fall.  “The evidence on the al-Qaeda links was sketchy.”

Her counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also sounded dubious about the administration’s effort to link al-Qaeda and Iraq.  “I think the ties were always tenuous at best,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who also voted for the war.  “The evidence about the ties was not compelling.”  Rockefeller said that his panel has a staff group focusing on the question and that the panel may hold a hearing just on this issue in the fall.

In two periods during the run-up to the war against Iraq — in late September and early October of 2002, just before the vote in Congress, and then this year in the weeks before the war — administration heavyweights highlighted what they portrayed as significant ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.  President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice all weighed in on this point, sometimes in a broad-brush way, sometimes with hints of tantalizing specifics.

Powell, in his major speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, cited the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who was in Baghdad in May 2002 receiving medical treatment for wounds he received in Afghanistan.  Powell referred to al-Zarqawi as “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.”

But several intelligence experts say Powell overstated these ties.  Al-Zarqawi “is at best seen as having linkages to al-Qaeda, instead of being a card-carrying member,” Cressey said.  “There’s no question that Zarqawi is a terrorist, but there are real questions about whether he’s a member of al-Qaeda,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA.

In his State of the Union address in January, Bush made the al-Qaeda-Iraq connection.  “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody,” the president said, “reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”  Bush darkly added, “Secretly and without fingerprints, [Hussein] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own.”

In perhaps the boldest assertion before the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Sept. 27 stated that the administration had several “bullet-proof” sentences in intelligence reports about ties between Iraq under Saddam and al-Qaeda.  “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade,” Rumsfeld said.

Bush echoed Rumsfeld’s remarks in his major address in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, asserting as well that al-Qaeda and Iraq had “high-level contacts that go back a decade.”  He also stated that “we’ve learned” that Iraqis trained Qaeda members in “bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”  And Bush posited that Iraq “could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.”

But even as the president made these comments, the key classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq making the rounds in the Bush administration presented a more nuanced and less alarmist view.  For instance, according to a recent Washington Post account, Bush didn’t mention a key conclusion of the intelligence report: that although high-level contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, these contacts had not been followed by any significant ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.  Similarly, intelligence sources have said that the claim that Bush made about Iraq training Qaeda members in bomb making or poison gas use had not been fully verified.

“There wasn’t the kind of link between Iraq and al-Qaeda that people wanted,” said one Bush administration alum.  The CIA, he added, had “some measure of intellectual responsibility and didn’t come up with a case.”

Moreover, the president failed to mention the report’s conclusion that the prevailing view in the intelligence community was much more guarded about the prospect of Hussein’s transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.  In fact, CIA Director George Tenet wrote to Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, that only if a U.S. attack against Iraq seemed imminent or inevitable might Hussein “decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the U.S. would be his last chance to exact vengeance.”

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was “extremely unlikely” that Hussein would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda.  Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there’s a “much stronger” argument to be made that “the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al-Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue.”

Bush particularly irked intelligence analysts when he landed on an aircraft carrier right after Baghdad fell and proclaimed that the U.S. had just “removed an ally of al-Qaeda.”  Thielmann, the former State Department analyst, calls the statement “an outrageous distortion” and a “shameless falsehood.”

Bush, when specifically asked at his news conference on July 30 whether the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were exaggerated and whether he now had more definitive evidence pointing to them, gave a long answer justifying the war on other grounds.  But on the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, he said only that David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector now in Iraq looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, was also going through piles of documents to look for such links.  “It’s going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered,” Bush said.

Some critics argue that by linking al-Qaeda and Iraq, the administration has not only misled the public about Iraq but about the real and continuing danger from al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration “created a powerful impression for the American public that al-Qaeda and Iraq were joined,” said Dan Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.  Benjamin added, “People don’t understand that al-Qaeda is a global insurgency distinct from states, and is eager to topple some states.”

Other former intelligence officials are also dismayed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s recent statement that the fight against Iraq is the “central battle” in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.  “The idea that the battle in Iraq is the central battle in the war on terrorism flies in the face of reality and all that we know about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other globally active terrorists,” Leverett said.

Looking ahead, some critics worry that the Iraq war could ultimately help al-Qaeda more than hurt it.  “A lot of people who could have been very helpful working on al-Qaeda were working on Iraq,” Graham, a presidential candidate, said.  “We shifted intelligence assets as well as military and intelligence people

Other Democrats concur.  “The war enormously deepened the pool of eager recruits for al-Qaeda,” Rockefeller said.  “I think that al-Qaeda was, is, and always will be a greater threat than Iraq.”

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United States-United Kingdom:  British Lawmaker Suspects Secret Nuclear Weapons Collaboration

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — British lawmaker Alan Simpson suspects the United States and the United Kingdom have been secretly collaborating to research and develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, including possibly low-yield ones.

“I think that is not only what is possible, I think that is what has been going on for some time.  That is my belief,” he said in a recent interview with Global Security Newswire. 

Simpson, who opposes developing such weapons, saying they might encourage insecurity and proliferation by some states, said his suspicions are fueled by more than 250 exchange visits by U.S. and British nuclear weapons scientists last year.

“We know that [there have been] transfers of huge numbers of staff between the U.S. and the U.K. programs,” he said.

A Labor Party backbencher who is one of the Labor government’s most outspoken critics on national security issues, the House of Commons member said his case is bolstered by previous secret U.S.-British nuclear weapons collaboration and the Bush administration’s push to develop nuclear weapons for attacking underground bunkers and incinerating chemical and biological weapons stores.

In addition, he said the government has dodged his requests for more information.

Spokesmen for the British and U.S. nuclear weapons establishments rebutted elements of Simpson’s charges but refused to comment on the nature of the scientific exchanges.

“The U.K. is not planning any new nuclear weapons, nor are we modifying current systems to lower their yield,” said Alan Price, head of communications for the United Kingdom’s national laboratory, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), in e-mailed comments.

“Cooperation takes place across areas of mutual scientific interest, but we do not comment on the details,” he said.

“I think it’s quite hard to pin down exactly what they’re doing because it’s such a secretive area,” said Nicola Butler, an analyst with the Acronym Institute.

“Having said that, I think the U.K. is following very closely what the Bush administration is doing because … the U.K. [nuclear weapons capabilities are] so dependent on the U.S., she said.

No Channeling

U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Bryan Wilkes denied a specific point of Simpson’s theory, saying U.S. scientists were not involved in any work on nuclear weapons with yields below five kilotons, an activity that has been prohibited by a 1993 law.

“We’re not breaking the law,” he said.

Commenting on Simpson’s charges, he said, “The implication is we’re not able to do [the research], but there are all of these visits, so ‘Could it be the Americans are getting this done through their allies?’” Wilkes said.

“I don’t know about the Brits … but we’re just not doing any work on it at all, even vicariously.  We’re not doing it through anybody, or channeling it, or anything like that,” he said.

Responses Questioned

Using a standard parliamentary procedure for obtaining information, Simpson in recent months has submitted lists of questions regarding the exchange visits and various activities of the AWE.

According to responses provided by government ministers, AWE staff in 2002 made 182 visits to U.S. government and contractor facilities and U.S. officials made 103 visits to similar facilities in the United Kingdom.

Such visits by AWE staff increased throughout the 1990s, from 110 in fiscal 1991 to 136 in fiscal 1995, and to 235 in fiscal 1999, according to a 1999 report jointly produced by Simpson.

The British government also identified U.S. sites that AWE staff visited, including the three major U.S. national nuclear laboratories, other university research laboratories, a dozen U.S. corporate facilities, and some military and Energy Department locations.

The government refused, however, to explain the purposes of the visits, citing a national security exemption law.  The NNSA similarly would not disclose their nature in response to questions from GSN.

The refusal, Simpson said, implies some controversial work is underway, beyond the cooperative stockpile maintenance work the two countries admit to.

If the exchanges were only for ensuring the stability of the existing stockpile, Simpson said, “you would have thought that it was in their interests, not just domestically but internationally, to be seen to be having a vigorous program about the maintenance and security.”

Simpson put his suspicions directly to the government, asking, “whether scientific endeavours at AWE include research on new designs for nuclear warheads.”

“The reply I got was rather vague and evasive …  They weren’t answering that,” he said.

The response, similar to one provided GSN by AWE’s Price, said there were no “plans” for a new weapon and that the government was pursuing a policy of maintaining capabilities to build new weapons if such a plan emerged.

“There are no current plans for any replacement for [the] Trident [strategic ballistic missile] and no decisions are yet needed.  In line with the 1998 Strategic Defense Review, it is our policy to maintain the capability to design and produce a successor weapon should this prove necessary,” the government said.

Some Work Permitted by Policies

That response was significant not just for its indirectness, Simpson said, but because it referenced an ambiguity in current British policy that might permit such work, short of actually building the weapons.  British scientists may be designing and developing a new weapon under the rationale of maintaining skills and capabilities to do so, he said.

“What they don’t say is that this minimum capability is to design and produce a successor [to Trident], and I think that gives them a fairly broad umbrella that they can shelter under,” Simpson said.  “I don’t know how you can maintain a capability to design and produce a successor generation if you are not doing work on what that successor generation might be like,” he added.

Price told GSN the United Kingdom maintains a “robust capability” to ensure the safety and reliability of the current British nuclear arsenal, consisting of fewer than 200 Trident warheads.

The United States has had a similar policy since the mid-1990s, following its decision to halt nuclear test explosions and to create the Stockpile Stewardship program in their place.  The September 1994 Nuclear Posture Review stated a still-existing Energy Department requirement to “maintain the capability to design, fabricate and certify new warheads.”

NNSA spokesman Wilkes acknowledged that under that policy U.S. scientists could design, research and develop new nuclear weapons, as long as they have yields greater than five kilotons.

“There’s nothing prohibiting us,” he said. 

No Formal Involvement

Simpson said his allegations are supported by the secret U.S.-British collaboration during the 1960s and 1970s to upgrade the Polaris ballistic missile, the Trident missile’s predecessor.  The work occurred over 12 years, involved 5,000 people at one point, and cost more than 1 billion pounds, before the British government acknowledged its existence and cost, he said.

“It was done in almost complete secrecy.  Congress didn’t even discover that this program was even in existence until the new weapons system was almost in existence,” he said.

Currently, neither nation has publicly indicated any plans to develop specific new nuclear weapons.

However, the Bush administration has expressed an interest in developing or modifying nuclear weapons to produce new capabilities.  It is pursuing congressional approval this year to continue research on modifying an existing higher-yield bunker buster and to research and develop new nuclear weapons, including low-yield ones, through a program called the Advanced Concepts Initiative.

The “current weapons stockpile cannot hold at risk a growing category of potential targets deeply buried in tunnel facilities, possibly containing chemical, biological, nuclear or command and control facilities,” said then-NNSA Administrator John Gordon in congressional testimony last year.

He said the goal was to produce options for future “production and deployment.”

The initiatives this year, though, have become politically charged, with congressional Democrats and some Republicans expressing criticism.  Bush administration officials now say they seek removal of the 1994 ban on low-yield production only to foster scientific freedom.

“We do not have anything specific in mind,” Wilkes said.

The aim, he said, is to eliminate overly restrictive constraints on scientific inquiry: “Scientific freedom.  Rights for scientists.”

Advanced Concepts Initiative

Simpson asked the British government if the United Kingdom is contributing to or receiving research and development information from the Advanced Concepts Initiative.

The government responded, “Exchanges of information on a wide field of technologies take place between the United Kingdom and the United States under the auspices of the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement.  There is no formal U.K. involvement in the U.S. Advanced Concepts Initiative or the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Concepts research program under the 1958 agreement.”

Simpson says he opposes developing such weapons that might be used for purposes other than deterrence and retaliation, and believes their development should be disclosed and debated within British society.

Otherwise, “You create on the international level a degree of uncertainty and confusion amongst your allies and potential enemies about whether you’re lowering your own threshold within which you would be prepared to use nuclear weapons,” he said.

With respect to suspected proliferators North Korea and Iran, he said, “If you were in those countries, and you were looking at what both the U.S. and the U.K. were able to get away with in terms of the development of substrategic nuclear weapons, would you feel reassured that you would be safe or not from the threat of attack or the actual attack with nuclear weapons?”

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United States I:  The Pros and Cons of New Nuclear Weapons

By James Kitfield

National Journal

Even as anti-nuke demonstrators were organizing protests around the country to commemorate the early August anniversaries of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the U.S. Strategic Command held a little-publicized meeting of senior Bush administration officials yesterday to advance plans for a new generation of nuclear arms.  Proponents of the plan argue that the United States needs to tailor smaller, “bunker-buster” nukes in order to threaten underground nuclear facilities that may be built by such nations as North Korea and Iran.  Opponents counter that manufacturing a new generation of nuclear weapons will deal a severe blow to the international arms control regime and break down the firewall separating nuclear and conventional arms, leading to greater nuclear proliferation and the increased possibility of a nuclear war.  What both sides agree on, however, is that nuclear proliferation is emerging as the single greatest threat to U.S. national security, and that America is at a crossroads in determining how to deal with it.

In recent interviews, National Journal correspondent James Kitfield spoke with leading voices on both sides of the argument.  C. Paul Robinson is director of Sandia National Laboratories, one of the nation’s three primary nuclear weapons labs, and a former chief negotiator at the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Nuclear Testing Talks in Geneva during the 1980s.  Joseph Cirincione is director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, and a co-author of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Following are edited excerpts of their separate interviews.

National Journal:  The one point of agreement that emerges in the debate about the Bush administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review is that the fundamental equation of nuclear deterrence has been forever altered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the proliferation of nuclear technology, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  Is that a fair assumption?

C. Paul Robinson:  Deterrence has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War, and we’re still sorting out what that means for our nuclear posture and the future.  As Russia becomes more of a friend than an enemy, we are no longer confronted with a nation that threatens our very existence.  I spent many sleepless nights during the Cold War worrying about stability matrixes and first-strike, “use-them-or-lose-them” calculations.  That kind of Armageddon scenario is now a distant worry.

I still worry, however, about the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies from Russia, because in many respects it’s a Third World nation now, and in the Third World everything is for sale.  I regret that as a nation we haven’t been bolder in developing a Marshall Plan for Russia that would help it reach at least a minimum level of prosperity, which is the best antidote to that kind of proliferation.  That problem is related, in turn, to what I believe is our greatest emerging threat — rogue states armed with nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.

NJ:  Given such seismic events as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, doesn’t it make sense to re-evaluate our strategic ability to deter aggression?

Joseph Cirincione:  Absolutely, and we should be taking a new look at our deterrence posture.  But it’s important for people to understand that this is not what the Bush administration is doing.  The January 2002 Nuclear Posture Review directed the departments of Energy and Defense to begin development of new nuclear weapons, and to formulate new policies to accommodate such weapons.  As a result, the nuclear weapons labs have re-established advanced-warhead concept teams to explore modifications of existing weapons, and to develop low-yield weapons and nuclear earth-penetrators that can be used against hardened targets.  So the Bush administration has already decided that we need new nuclear weapons, and they are now going ahead implementing policies to reach that goal step by step.  They understand that this is a very controversial decision, however, so they have adopted “salami” tactics — they are slicing off a little bit at a time.

NJ:  Are the labs developing new nuclear weapons?

Robinson:  That depends on how you define “new.”  If we take a warhead off the shelf that we designed and tested in the past, and then put it on a new delivery vehicle, is that a new nuclear weapon?  We will probably have to manufacture new copies because we produced only a few originally, but it is not a new design, nor will we need to test it.  I can categorically state that no one is proposing returning to nuclear testing.

The main point is that the world is not static.  Over the past decade, nations have gone to school on our conventional military capabilities, and many of them have adopted a strategy of moving their high-value targets out of our reach by locating them in deeply buried tunnels and inside mountains.  If you want to know who the main culprits are, just look at which nations are buying these huge tunnel-boring machines.  You’ll find that North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya have all built a lot of underground facilities.  We keep having to relearn this lesson that the world is not stupid, and potential adversaries will constantly take actions to better their strategic position and counter our strengths.  I would argue that the United States must respond by maintaining a robust deterrent against whatever is hidden in those underground facilities.

NJ:  Does the United States need a low-yield, nuclear bunker buster to hold an enemy’s underground facilities at risk?

Cirincione:  This argument that we need mini-nukes as earth penetrators is based on a lie.  Every independent study done on this issue has concluded that for any target buried more than 50 yards underground, you would still need a very large nuclear warhead.  Mini-nukes of a kiloton or less just don’t get the job done.  The big nukes you would need in order to reach a truly deep underground bunker, meanwhile, would kick up so much dirt that you would have a major problem with radioactive fallout.

More to the point, there are multiple ways of attacking underground facilities using conventional weapons that would be more effective.  With repeated precision strikes using conventional earth-penetrating bombs, you can bore deeper and deeper until you reach your target.  You could use high-temperature thermo-baric weapons that have the advantage of destroying biological and chemical agents and pathogens.  You could use precision-strike or Special Operations forces to seal the exit and entrance tunnels to an underground facility.

NJ:  Are there viable conventional alternatives to nuclear bunker busters?

Robinson:  Our primary focus is still to accomplish this with conventional weapons, and we work hard on that problem.  Nuclear weapons remain a blunt instrument of last resort.  We’ve conducted more than 4,000 penetrator tests at Sandia since the 1960s, however, and we have a lot of data on the problem.  Basically our tests show that conventional penetrators don’t work very well.  In the aftermath of the bombing campaign against Serbia, for instance, we discovered that we did very little to no damage against buried targets.

So if we can find ways to strike these buried targets with conventional weapons, we will.  If we can’t, however, we need to look at what can be accomplished with a nuclear earth-penetrator that causes the least possible amount of collateral damage.  That leads you away from two-stage, thermonuclear weapons to smaller-yield, lighter weapons with high reliability.  A national command authority confronted in a crisis with the prospect of killing 40,000 people with a thermonuclear weapon in order to take out a bunker is probably going to decide not to.  If we could design a bunker buster that would kill an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people, on the other hand, the answer would probably be yes if the situation was critical.  Those are the weapons the Bush administration gave us the OK to begin researching about a year ago, because our scientists felt handcuffed by restrictions that were in place at the time.

NJ:  Would rogue nations be deterred from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, or building underground bunkers, if they knew their facilities could be reached by nuclear earth-penetrators?

Cirincione:  The Bush administration has adopted this arrogant attitude that the United States can take the dramatic step of developing these weapons, and there will be no international repercussions or imitators.  If the most powerful nation the world has ever known says it needs a new class of nuclear weapon to defend itself against weapons of mass destruction, however, why don’t other countries also need them?  Why doesn’t Iran, which has actually been attacked by chemical weapons?

The real danger of this concept is that it blurs the lines between nuclear and conventional weapons, making nukes just another tool in the toolbox that could be used for tactical battlefield purposes.  In that sense, this argument is less about deterrence than war fighting.  We already have plenty of doomsday weapons in our arsenal if all we’re trying to do is scare people.  They are planning on using these weapons.  And if the United States were to use them, it would cross a threshold that has not been breached since the Truman administration.  That in turn would encourage other nations to develop and use nuclear weapons in a similar manner.  That’s not in the United States’ national security interests.  Given that we have never accepted a nuclear weapon into our arsenal without testing — with the exception of the Hiroshima bomb — the path the Bush administration is on also greatly increases the likelihood that the United States will return to nuclear testing, which would be a terrible blow to the nonproliferation regime.

NJ:  Will developing a nuclear bunker buster likely lead to new testing?

Robinson:  I don’t think we will need new testing, because the warhead we are talking about has already been tested.  As I said earlier, we would need to start production of new warheads again.

I continue to abide by my statements that we’re a long way from going back to nuclear tests.  Having said that, I helped write the safeguards that were written into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratification protocols, which essentially stated that the president of the United States would withdraw from the treaty and return to testing if a serious problem developed in the U.S. nuclear arsenal that required testing for a solution.  The point I’m making is, the United States has been willing to abide by these treaties only as long as they do not conflict with our essential security posture.

NJ:  How do you respond to arms-control experts who charge that remanufacturing a new class of nuclear bunker busters violates the Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits the United States to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race” and “to nuclear disarmament?”

Robinson:  I was in the Reagan administration when we debated what exactly was meant by Article VI of the NPT, and it seems to me that the end state of total nuclear disarmament that the treaty envisions will occur around the same time that the lamb lies down with the lion.  And I always argued that even at that point, the lamb still won’t get much sleep.

In truth, I believe that the NPT was intended more as a confidence-building measure than as a real arms-control treaty that we were willing to bet our country’s survival on.  We would never have negotiated an arms control treaty with the ridiculous verification inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency prescribed in the NPT, which missed the programs in Iraq and Iran and even Israel.  Where has the IAEA spent the most money in terms of inspections?  In Germany, Canada, and Japan.  Why?  Because it is a confidence-building measure among friendly countries eager to prove they are not violating it.  It was never set up to catch cheaters.  That’s why I disagree with people who infer that the NPT is a real arms control treaty.  It’s not.

NJ:  Is the NPT more a gentlemen’s agreement than an arms control treaty?

Cirincione:  That’s just nonsense.  President Bush just negotiated a treaty on strategic nuclear weapons with Moscow that has no verification regime, yet he still insists that it’s vital to our national security.  The NPT was the beginning of what became a comprehensive, interlocking network of treaties, agreements and enforcement mechanisms designed to stop the proliferation of not only nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons.  It established a legal and diplomatic framework for a non-nuclear future, and it has worked.  Instead of the 20 to 25 nuclear nations that President John F. Kennedy predicted, we now have eight worldwide.  That’s still eight too many, but that’s not a bad track record.

As the nuclear states continue to move toward ever-smaller arsenals as called for in the NPT, we will continue to devalue nuclear weapons globally.  That’s the whole crux of the matter: Given our overwhelming conventional military superiority, the United States is more secure in a world where nuclear weapons are devalued and dwindling as opposed to a world where we and others are developing new nuclear weapons for new uses.

Now, there are certainly enforcement problems with the nonproliferation regime, as there are with all international and national laws.  Does that automatically mean the laws are useless?  No, it means we need to get better at enforcement and adapting them to new circumstances.  There’s no question that we need to toughen IAEA inspections and to take a fresh look at some of the fundamental tenets of the nonproliferation regime.  Some people in the Bush administration think the first thing you do in such a circumstance is tear down the bridge you’re standing on.  I argue instead that we need to strengthen the bridge.

NJ:  Do you credit the NPT for slowing the march of nuclear proliferation?

Robinson:  I think the North Atlantic Treaty extending our nuclear umbrella to our European allies did much more to prevent nations from going nuclear than the NPT, and will do more in the future as more Eastern European nations join NATO.  That’s why I argue that we should also extend that umbrella further from Japan to encompass Southeast Asian nations such as South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.

NJ:  Do you ever worry that the United States’ aggressive strategy of pre-emption, coupled with our overwhelming conventional military capability, might convince some nations that nuclear weapons are their only deterrent against us?

Robinson:  The National Security Strategy lays out very carefully the conditions that might prompt pre-emption, which are basically limited to those instances when the threat of many American deaths is imminent and you have the nexus of rogue states with weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists.  Having said that, a friend of mine recently pointed out that the United States was not deterred from going to war by Iraq’s supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.  We haven’t responded nearly as quickly to North Korea’s announcement that it has nuclear weapons.  Some people could draw the lesson that the United States can be deterred by nuclear weapons, but not by chemical or biological ones.  I can’t argue with that conclusion.

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North Korea:  Washington Ready to Offer Nonaggression Agreement

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it is prepared, with its allies in the region, to offer a joint written nonaggression guarantee to North Korea, the Washington Times reported (see GSN, Aug. 7).

“There should be ways to capture assurances to the North Koreans — from not only the United States, but we believe from other parties in the region — that there is no hostile intent among the parties that might be participating in such a discussion,” said U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, noting that an assurance may a be more practical alternative to a formal treaty because a treaty would have little hope of being approved by Congress.

“When one comes up with such a document, such a written assurance, there are ways that Congress can take note of it without it being a treaty or some kind of pact.  A resolution is something like that — taking note of something,” he added.

Diplomats from South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, are scheduled to visit U.S. officials next Wednesday and Thursday to plan their negotiating strategies in talks with North Korea (Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, Aug. 8).

“I believe the United States has arranged its proposal to North Korea between yesterday (Wednesday) and today,” said Wi Sung-lac, director general for the North American Affairs Bureau in the South Korean Foreign Ministry (Korea Herald, Aug. 8).

Chinese vice foreign minister Wang Yi, meanwhile, has arrived in North Korea to discuss the impending talks (James Brooke, New York Times, Aug. 8).

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United States II:  Conference Examines Bush Plans for Nuclear Weapons; Gore Lashes Out at White House

U.S. officials held a one-day conference yesterday to discuss U.S. nuclear policy and possible changes to the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.  Officials from the U.S. Defense and State departments, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the National Security Council, the Air Force and the Navy were expected to attend the closed meeting (see GSN, Aug. 5).

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers said the meeting would address ways to maintain the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without testing them, but a leaked agenda included the discussion question, “What is the uncertainty in confidence and potential risk threshold for a test recommendation — what would demand a test?” (CBSNews.com, Aug. 7).

The agenda also indicated that officials would discuss the viability of low-yield nuclear weapons (BBC News, Aug. 8).

In comments on U.S. nuclear weapon policy prepared for a speech yesterday, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore yesterday lashed out at the Bush administration plans.

“This administration has rejected [the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty] and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a new program to build a brand new generation of smaller (and it hopes, more usable) nuclear bombs.  In my opinion, this would be true madness,” Gore said (Federal News Service transcript, Aug. 8).

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Iran:  Inspectors Due in Iran Next Week

A team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to visit Iran next week to discuss the Additional Protocol, which would allow for greater international monitoring of Iranian nuclear activities (see GSN, Aug. 6).

Iranian officials are currently debating the merits of the protocol agreement.

The team will also carry out some inspections, allowed by current agreements, in the next few days, according to the IAEA (IAEA release, Aug. 8).

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United States III:  Air Force Conducts Successful Minuteman 3 ICBM Test

The U.S. Air Force Wednesday successfully tested a Minuteman 3 ICBM, according to the Santa Maria Times (see GSN, June 11).

The missile, ar