[sacw] S A A N Post | 27 Dec 00

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Wed, 27 Dec 2000 16:20:53 +0100


South Asians Against Nukes Post
27 December 2000

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#1. APPEAL from the Dutch Campaign Against Arms Trade and the India
Committee of the Netherlands
#2. On the Road to a solution on Kashmir
#3. Former Chair. of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (1993-1996) speaks
#4. India: 220-MW atomic plant in Rajasthan goes commercial
#5. India: construction of Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor in Kalpakkam all
set to begin
#6. India: Gujarat - Bid to steal high purity magnesium foiled
#7. India: An anti nuclear activist from Jadugoda Uranium mine area in
Jharkhand writes

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#1.

27 December 2000

URGENT APPEAL from the Dutch Campaign Against Arms Trade and the India
Committee of the Netherlands

Dear friends,

We urgently ask you to sign (as individual or organisation) the petition
below that asks the Dutch government to reverse their recent decision to
lift the arms embargo against India and Pakistan, as we believe that our
position will be stronger with support from like-minded activists with a
South Asian background and other international peace activists. In earlier
contacts with peace activists from the Subcontinent we have noted support
for military sanctions to press the respective governments to give up their
deadly nuclear game.
We are convinced (and the government's letter suggests so as well) that the
move is largely made under strong pressure from the arms industry, which
has experienced the loss of two respected clients. Since 1990 the
Netherlands supplied military goods worth around US$ 150 million to India
and Pakistan. Before the sanctions India was the fourth biggest recipient
of Dutch arms outside NATO. With recent arms deals made by especially
Sweden, France and the UK, the Dutch government feels isolated now within
the European Union being the only country applying a strict stop on exports
of military goods. The EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports however implies
that arms should not be sold to regions of tension. We therefore also want
to suggest that if you live in a EU country to write your government or MPs
and ask them to stop arms exports to India and Pakistan.
The matter will be discussed here in Parliament 17 January 2001. In the
week before we want to offer the petition to the Parliament.

Please confirm support by sending a message to Frank Slijper
<rosaboek@x...>, mentioning 'signature' and the name and place of you
and your organisation.

In solidarity,

Gerard Oonk (India Committee of the Netherlands),
Frank Slijper (Dutch Campaign Against Arms Trade)

--------------------
Dear Madam, Sir,

We write you this letter to express our concern about the lifting of the
Dutch arms embargo against India and Pakistan as has been decided by the
government on Tuesday 12 December 2000.

Your government imposed military sanctions immediately after the nuclear
tests of both countries in May 1998. Since then Pakistan and India have
continued moving forward on the road to full nuclearisation of their
weaponry. We have witnessed nuclear capable missile tests from both sides,
the Kargil conflict, the loss of democracy in Pakistan and a huge 28
percent rise in the Indian defence budget, besides the general nuclear
rethoric that is regularly practiced by the nuclear and military
establishments. We think though that the recent ceasefire on both sides of
the Line of Control in Kashmir is a positive step towards a peaceful
resolution of the tense and near-war relation between the two countries.
India and Pakistan do not need any more weapons to solve their problems.

We therefore ask you to put pressure on the Dutch government to reimpose a
stop on the export of military goods to both India and Pakistan. Also we
would like you to ask the Dutch government to step up diplomatic pressure
on member states of the European Union to act in accordance with the spirit
of the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports and stop arms sales to India and
Pakistan.

Yours sincerely,

(your name, organisation, place, country)

______

#2.

The Telegraph
25 December 2000

FIFTH COLUMN/ SLOW MOVE TOWARDS A FINAL SOLUTION 

BY GWYNNE DYER

Eleven years of killing, over
50,000 dead and the highest ratio of soldiers to civilians in the world,
with a nuclear war between India and Pakistan as the pay-off if things get
out of hand: the conflict in Kashmir dwarfs every other global
confrontation in its potential for harm. But the prospects for peace are
actually rising in Kashmir.

The clock seemed to be ticking down on India's unilateral ceasefire in
Kashmir, originally due to expire at the end of the Muslim holy month of
Ramadan on December 27. But it has now been extended by the Indian
government until Republic Day on January 26. The local situation has
remained such that India may review possibilities of further extending the
ceasefire. That could be a new beginning for the whole region, and nowhere
needs it more.

Analysts in the subcontinent and elsewhere prattle on about a nuclear
"balance of terror" between India and Pakistan, but they are talking
through their hats. The old Cold War "balance of terror" between East and
West only came into existence after the mid-Sixties, when both sides had
built thousands of nuclear weapons that were invulnerable to surprise
attack because they were buried deep in missile silos or hidden away at
sea in submarines.

Disarming surprise

That stabilized the confrontation somewhat, because it was no longer
possible to disarm one's adversary with a surprise first-strike that
eliminated all his nuclear weapons. Every nuclear attack would be met with
a nuclear counter-attack-technically called "mutually assured
destruction". But this period was preceded in the Cold War by a far more
dangerous decade when surprise nuclear attacks might have succeeded-and
that is the technological era that Pakistan and India are living through
now.

Perhaps in ten years' time India and Pakistan will have buried their
nuclear missiles in silos or sent them out to sea. Now their few dozen
nuclear warheads are just sitting out in the open, slung under the wings
of aircraft at the end of runways, or screwed to the top of relatively
short-range missiles at military bases not far from the border. A
disarming surprise attack could work, and the warning time available is
only 15-20 minutes.

So both countries have "launch-on-warning" policies, even though they know
radar operators can make mistakes. Some dozens of nuclear warheads
exploding over airfields and military bases across northern India and
Pakistan (plus, almost certainly, over New Delhi and Islamabad) would not
be literally the end of the world, but tens of millions would die.

Enough for the moment

The need to step back from this hair-trigger confrontation was part of the
reason for the three-month ceasefire declared last August by the biggest of
the Kashmiri guerrilla outfits, Hizbul Mujahedin. It collapsed after only
two weeks, but it would never have happened without encouragement from
Pakistan (which arms the guerrillas, though it officially denies it).

The Indian government's ceasefire this month has held considerably better,
and behind the scenes, major concessions are being discussed. New Delhi no
longer demands that all the Kashmiri groups pledge allegiance to the
Constitution before starting to talk. Pakistan is signalling that it no
longer insists on being included in the talks from the start, though there
must be some understanding that it will be brought in before the end.

"If we're genuinely interested in peace, we've got to engage", says Abdul
Ghani Bhat, chairman of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference that unites all
the pro-independence parties in Kashmir. As long as everybody keeps the
final destination sufficiently vague, it may be possible for all the
parties to stop the killing and start talking.

"Talks" doesn't mean a final solution for the Kashmir question, which
dates back to the decision of the state's Hindu ruler to opt for India at
Partition in 1947, despite its majority Muslim population. It certainly
doesn't mean the referendum on Kashmir's future that Jawaharlal Nehru
promised 50 years ago. It just means talks, and maybe more autonomy for
Kashmir-plus an end to the killing, and the withdrawal of a few hundred
thousand Indian troops and police from Kashmir's towns and villages, and a
long step away from the brink of a regional nuclear war. Enough for the
moment.

________

#3.

Rediff.com

Dr Gopalakrishnan former Chairman of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board
(1993-1996) speaking to Rediff's Associate Editor George Iype in November
2000.

'What is appalling is that the safety recommendations are
yet to be attended to, even in September 2000'
Dr A Gopalakrishnan

Rediff: Do you think India's nuclear power plants are money guzzling? Is it not
a fact that after spending so much money in the past three decades, the
energy produced is just three per cent?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: 'Money guzzling' is a poor definition. If you mean, "Do
you feel it is a waste of taxpayers' money to expand the nuclear power
programme", that can be attempted to be answered.

My answer is that the nuclear programme needs to be much more tightly
planned and controlled, under the careful financial and parliamentary
scrutiny before large amounts of additional public funds are committed. It
certainly should not be left to be run the way it is by the Department of
Atomic
Energy.

Now that India has declared itself a nuclear weapons power, it is high time
that we separate our nuclear activities clearly into civilian and military
components and let the civilian work be scrutinised and funded like any other
power sector project in terms of investments and returns on investment, and
more importantly, on the basis of per kilowatt-hour price for nuclear
electricity
and what it means to public safety.

In doing so, there should be transparency in the details of costing of all
inputs
for nuclear power. All subsidies coming indirectly into this programme will
have to be included in the costs. Then only one can make a choice on how
much of nuclear power to set up, as against how much coal-based power
NTPC should be funded to set up, and how much hydropower NHPC can be
funded to set up.

After all, the NTPC, the NHPC and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India
Limited are all public sector power companies. The limited amount of
taxpayers' money that is available for investment in power must go to these
three organisations in proportion to their overall economic and environmental
merits, and not with a step-motherly attitude to NTPC and NHPC alone, as it is
today.

Rediff: Last year you had said that the threat of a serious nuclear accident at
our nuclear plants is real. Can you elaborate?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: I was chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board
from 1993 to 1996. In 1995, the AERB under me brought out a
comprehensive document on the safety of DAE installations. It was
subsequently accepted by the Atomic Energy Commission and passed on to
the DAE to take corrective steps. The contents of the report were all based on
earlier analyses and committee findings of the DAE and their organisations,
and not any new evidence generated by the AERB.

What this report brought out is the fact that many serious safety
deficiencies in
our early-stage installations were identified as far back as in 1979 and
1987 by
the DAE. But these deficiencies had not been rectified even at the time of the
report in 1995.

Rediff: Has the government or the DAE now implemented the safety
suggestions?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: What is appalling is that the more crucial of the safety
recommendations are yet to be attended to, even in September 2000. The
deficiencies pointed out and prioritised in the 1995 AERB report have
certainly placed the safety levels of some of our installations well below the
norms that are internationally applied for deciding on the continued operation
of nuclear facilities.

The DAE is postponing the repairs because of several reasons. In some cases,
it will necessitate very long shutdown of a facility, for tackling some of the
problems well enough. Then there are technologies that have not yet been
indigenously developed. In certain instances spare parts and equipment are
denied to India.

But certainly the government will provide the funds needed, if only the DAE
will come forward with a plan to do the urgent rectification. Theunderlying
reason for the current state of affairs is a scorn on the part of the DAE
for any
independent view from outside. The total lack of awareness on the part of the
public, a lack of effective media interest and activism, as well as the
newfound strength of the Indian nuclear establishment as the 'bomb-maker'
and the consequential influence they have on the current government have
made the DAE pretend that it knows everything.

Rediff: Can a Chernobyl-type accident take place in Indian nuclear power
plants?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: I have said earlier also that a Chernobyl-type accident is
very unlikely in Indian nuclear power stations. What is not realised is
that away
from all the sensationalism of Chernobyl, there are lesser accidents which
could still release moderate amounts of radioactivity into the very crowded
areas surrounding some of our less safe installations at Madras, Trombay or
Tarapur, which could be devastating to a large number of people.

The Madras Atomic Power Plant reactors that are operated without effective
emergency cooling systems are situated right outside Madras. The danger is
that unlike other countries, we have nuclear weapons work and
plutonium-producing reactors operating right next to crowded areas of
Bombay.

________

#4.

The Times of India
25 December 2000
Business

220-MW atomic plant in Rajasthan goes commercial

JAIPUR: The 220-MW fourth plant of
the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) has gone commercial taking the
power generation capacity of the station to 790 MW.

The fourth unit of RAPS, based on pressurised heavy water reactor,
situated at Rawat Bhata near Kota was on Monday declared 'commercial'
after being cleared by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board to raise the
power of the reactor to its full capacity, an official spokesman said.

The unit, which had attained criticality on November 3, had been
synchronised with the northern grid on November 17.

The power generation capacity of all of the Nuclear Power Corporation of
India Limited (NPCIL), which has 14 operating reactors, has gone up to
2,720 MW.

[...] .

(UNI)

_______

#5.

Frontline
Volume 17 - Issue 26, Dec. 23, 2000 - Jan. 05, 2001

SPECIAL FEATURE: IGCAR
A mission at Kalpakkam

The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research in Kalpakkam is all set to
begin construction of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor, the forerunner of
a series of fast breeder reactors to be set up in the country, to generate
nuclear power.

by T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

The full text of the abvove story is available at:
http://www.the-hindu.com/fline/fl1726/17261240.htm

_______

#6.

Rediff.com
26 December 2000
PTI Report

Bid to steal high purity magnesium foiled

Four persons have been arrested
in connection with stealing 20 tonnes of high purity magnesium to
Bhavnagar in Gujarat, originally imported by the Department of Atomic
Energy for its Nuclear Fuel Complex at Hyderabad.

Police Tuesday said the driver of a motor trailer, Mohan Singh alias
Bengali Mohanto was arrested at Calcutta and brought to Bombay while three
of his accomplices, who helped him in taking the consignments to Bhavnagar
were arrested in Bombay on Monday.

Police said a consignment of 80 metric tonnes of high purity magnesium
ingots from China had reached Bombay port and was later sent to NFC
Hyderabad in four sealed container trailers on November 23.

However, on November 27 only three trailers reached the destination while
one disappeared mysteriously, following which the Department of Atomic
Energy lodged a complaint with the Sewri police station, they said.

Police traced the trailer driver in Calcutta, who during interrogation
revealed that he had taken the vehicle to Bhavagar.

Police have also arrested his accomplices and recovered the entire
consignment of 20 tonnes at Bhavnagar and the empty trailer was traced
near Baroda.

______

#7.

Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2000 23:38:35 -0800 (PST)
From: shri prakash
Subject: jadugoda

Jadugoda is a small town near India's largest steel plant city
Jamashedpur, located in the East Singhbhum District of the newly created
state of Jharkhand.

In the past, the Jadugoda movement was considered to be only a tribal
movement against the harmful effects of radiation. However, now after many
years as the movement has progressed, JOAR (Jharkhand Organisation Against
Radiation) has worked to broaden the movement to include all the people
living near this mill mine and tailing dam.

The hunger strike, or fasting for a specific cause, was a non-violent
means of protest used by Gandhi-ji as well as many other activists. JOAR
has also decided to take up this form of action (there seems no other
option considering the non-tribal population which is very strong in many
ways). The aim is to draw the attention of the people and put pressure on
the authorities.

The program went as follows:
Dec. 10 -15 Jadugoda: Continuation of protest meeting in the main
meeting place
Dec. 16 - 22 protest meeting(Dharna)
Dec. 22 Mass meeting
Dec. 23 -29 Serial hunger strikes

PROTEST NOTES:
* After learning of this schedule, the authorities after knowing have
stopped the train shipment for these dates.
* We received a great response during this movement.
* Only a few local newspapers covered the story and the so-called
"national" daily completely blacked out this news.
* People from distant villages came to show their support. Many non-tribal
groups and some political parties came to join the protest fast.
* Most importantly, there was a big anti-nuclear protest rally in
Jamshedpur (a nearby district town). This was the first time this kind of
protest rally has taken place out side of Jadugoda-a milestone for the
movement!

With this growing support, JOAR has decided to continue the hunger strike
until December 29th due to the fact that there was no train shipment of
the uranium waste.

THE JOAR PROTEST WILL BE EXTENDED UNTIL 29 DECEMBER!
PLEASE CONTINUE
THE SUPPORT!

shriprakash
ranchi based film activist.