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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (50159)	10/8/2002 8:01:25 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes, I can imagine an Oil refinery having very high safety standards. All those expensive volatile chemicals and expensive machinery plant. Strong incentive for a nice safe environment for the workers. Same with some semiconductor plants and the air they breath. Even if it's a sweltering hot day, and the office workers are finding it uncomfortable, the workers in the fabrication areas have air and humidity at just the right conditions. The semiconductor processes don't work otherwise -lol- Some small sacrifices have to be made for the stock holders interest in profit. -g- So what of GWB, Tony B, and the industrial military complex? How much of this Saddam thing is a genuine problem, and how much just some war mongers out to try some new war toys and book some business.?? To answer this question I look to what the Russians are thinking. Putin seems to be busy with Georgia now, so no clue there. Found this piece from the MT interesting.. themoscowtimes.com British Report May Backfire By Pavel Felgenhauer The United States and Britain were last week wooing the other permanent members of the UN Security Council -- France, Russia and China -- to support a draft resolution that threatens the use of force, if the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein does not promptly surrender all weapons of mass destruction. To reinforce its firm stand on Iraq, the British government last week published an assessment of Iraq's WMD development programs, based on the work of the British Joint Intelligence Committee. But the French, Russian and Chinese governments do not seem to have been convinced by the evidence. Saddam's regime spent lots of money and effort making WMD in the 1980s. Iraq produced large amounts of chemical agents (2,850 tons of mustard gas, 210 tons of tabun, 795 tons of sarin and 3.9 tons of VX nerve gas) and produced lethal biological materials. Iraq also attempted to make nuclear weapons, although it never managed to develop technologies to enrich uranium as fissile material. Iraq produced 16,000 free-fall bombs and more than 110,000 artillery rockets designed to deliver chemical and biological agents. Saddam never used biological weapons, but large amounts of mustard gas and nerve agents were used during the 1980s against Iranian troops and rebel Kurds. Some 20,000 Iranian soldiers and 5,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, are reported to have perished during these gas attacks. Iraq fired more than 500 Scud-type missiles at at both civilian and military targets in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and 93 Scud-type missiles during the Gulf War -- targeting Israel and the coalition forces in Saudi Arabia. After 1991, most of Iraq's WMD were destroyed together with the delivery systems, including ballistic missiles. Some relatively small number of such weapons, according to the British document, could have been hidden by Saddam, including up to 20 al-Hussein missiles capable of carrying chemical or biological warheads. But are these residual capabilities really a serious threat? The al-Hussein missile that in 1991 was used to attack Israel is a modified Soviet-designed Scud-B with extra range -- 650 kilometers instead of 290 kilometers. But the extra range comes at the price of a much smaller payload and decreased accuracy. The al-Hussein missile used in 1991 had an impact fuse to detonate its conventional warhead. It did not have a detachable warhead -- the entire missile traveled as one piece with supersonic speed, crashing together with its warhead and increasing the damage in the impact area. But such a missile is totally unfit for delivering and dispersing chemical or biological agents. A chemical (or biological) ballistic warhead would need a radio or other noncontact fuse that could burst open the warhead cover in flight, so that the incoming air stream would disperse the liquid agent in an aerosol cloud. The exact timing and distance from the target of the noncontact fuse explosions are critical. A few seconds too early and the aerosol cloud forms too high and is diluted by wind to a harmless concentration before reaching the ground. A few seconds too late and there's no time left for the aerosol cloud to form. Iraq acknowledged in the 1990s that it had produced 50 chemical and 25 biological warheads for its ballistic missiles, but they were never used and there is no evidence that extensive flight testing ever took place. An unprepared chemical/biological attack today, using an untested warhead on an inaccurate al-Hussein missile against Israel, for example, could well result in a lethal aerosol cloud engulfing a Palestinian city, if the warhead worked at all. The British document makes it clear that today Saddam does not have any serious long-range mass destruction capabilities and that his short-range capability is severely limited. The document mentions Iraqi plans to convert an old Czech-made L-29 trainer jet into a slow-flying unmanned homemade cruise missile -- a clear sign of a desperate lack of serious alternatives. Saddam is a bloody tyrant who obviously wants to obtain WMD, but the UN arms inspections managed to contain him during the 1990s and may be effective today. The international community will have to choose whether to continue with containment until Saddam dies of natural causes or is overthrown by some internal revolt, or to go in and oust him by force. The British document was apparently intended to bolster the "regime change" option, but its findings actually provide strong support for a policy of containment. Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

To: Ilaine who wrote (50159)	10/8/2002 9:10:57 AM
From: Ish	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<<But the type of neglect that led to Bhopal was more like entropy. Things decay and you have to keep up with them. If you let down your guard, they break.>> After a few years the safety inspectors at the Clinton nuke plant quit testing the valves etc. and just signed the sheets monthly that they had been tested. After a series of accidents the feds moved in and found that the tests hadn't been done for 10 years. They shut the plant down for almost a year to get everything back to 100%.