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[7] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Aug 16, 2005 Subject: Arms Race in South Asia suklasen Pakistan Times 14Aug2005 Gunning for peace in South Asia By Siddharth Srivastava Sunday, August 14, 2005, NEW DELHI: Two recent defense-related happenings in India and Pakistan are of note. Pakistan has test-fired its first cruise missile, which India believes cannot happen without the help of the Chinese. Second, there are revelations of a quiet but steep climb in India-Israel defense relations, despite stiff competition from Russia, France and United Kingdom, the traditional big suppliers to India. The US, which has opened its arms arsenal to India, is expected to give Israel stiff competition. The two developments in Pakistan and India are inter-linked. They show that despite confidence-building measures, peace talks, synergies in the Iran-Pakistan-India oil pipeline and the recent breakthroughs in trade-related matters, India and Pakistan continue to stockpile arms, and suspicions refuse to subside. While some of the sources of defense inputs and material to Pakistan may be unknown (with indicators pointing towards China and North Korea), India is not averse to finding new partners and upgrading its weapons systems. The Israelis are known for cutting-edge equipment and fit the bill to modernize the Indian armed forces. Many experts believe that Pakistan wants to quickly upgrade its weapons systems in response to India's burgeoning defense relations with Israel and the US, with their state-of-the art weapon system. The Chinese are more than willing to oblige as they are never comfortable with India rising militarily without an effective check by Pakistan. China's fears have been compounded by the new-found bonhomie between India and US. The share of India-US arms relations is expected to pick up in the future as discussions have only begun. In June, a 10-year defense agreement titled the "New Framework for the US-India Defense Relationship", was signed between Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his counterpart Donald Rumsfeld. The US has offered joint production of weapons, apart from sales, that sets the tone of a long-term relationship. India miffed India is predictably miffed with Pakistan successfully test-firing its first cruise missile this week, joining a select band of nations that have developed the ground-hugging projectiles. President General Pervez Musharraf hailed the launch of the Hatf VII Babur, which is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, as a "major milestone" in the country's defense program. Experts in India insist that Pakistan does not have the know-how to build cruise missiles which, unlike ballistic missiles, do not leave the atmosphere and are powered and guided throughout their flight path. In an interview, former chief adviser (technology) of the Defense Research and Development Organization, K Santhanam, said: "China is peddling at least two types of cruise missiles in the international market ... My assessment is that this Pakistani missile is of Chinese origin, with a label change." The US-backed Missile Technology Control Regime prevents the proliferation of missiles capable of delivering a 500-kilogram payload over distances of 300 kilometers and more. Although Musharraf hailed his scientists and engineers who "have once again done the nation proud by mastering a rare technology", experts in India believe that Pakistan's missile program has the secret backing of China and North Korea. The 750-kilometer range Shaheen-I and 1,500-kilometer Ghauri-I ballistic missiles are believed to be derivatives of the Chinese M-9 and North Korean Nodong missiles But it is clear that Pakistan's bid to induct cruise missiles as well as pile up ballistic missiles is an attempt to balance India's declared intentions to incorporate a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system either from Israel or the US. India is already examining offers for the American Patriot-3 and Israeli Arrow-2 anti-ballistic missile systems. The BMD system can be effectively checked by cruise missiles. Apart from inducting the Agni-I (700-800-kilometer range) and Agni-II (2,000-kilometer-plus range) ballistic missiles, India has its own cruise missile BrahMos, with a 300-kilometer strike range. The Indian navy is already inducting the BrahMos, which is believed to be similar to the American Tomahawk cruise missiles widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Curiously, Pakistan did not give any prior warning to India of the cruise test, despite a recent agreement between the two to notify each other before missile tests and to set up a hotline to prevent an accidental atomic exchange. The deal only referred to ballistic missiles and not to cruise missiles, for which there was no agreement, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Naeem Khan said. The India-Israel nexus There is reason for Pakistan to modernize its weapons systems, by any means. It is estimated that India will purchase arms to the tune of $15 billion over the next few years. This will include fighter jets, submarines, tanks and technological advancements. This week, Mukherjee put a figure to the rising defense ties between India and Israel. The fillip to India-Israel defense relations happened under the previous Bharatiya Janata Party administration of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, but the current dispensation under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has kept up the tempo. Israel has now overtaken France, the UK and other countries to become the second-largest defense supplier to India. The value of military arsenal works out close to $1 billion each year for the past three years. Russia remains India's biggest defense partner, notching over $1.5 billion every year due to the deeply entrenched relations between the two countries that hark back to the Cold War era. Three-quarters of the equipment in use by the armed forces is of Russian origin, requiring spares and maintenance. However, it is increasingly becoming apparent that the breakup of the Soviet Union has had its impact, with Russia unable to keep up with the latest upgrades in technology. This major chunks of the modernization efforts of the Indian armed forces are now being sourced from Israel. One of the biggest deals has been the $1.1 billion contract signed in March 2004 for three Phalcon early warning radar and communications systems to fulfill the air force's long-standing demand for AWACS (airborne warning and control systems). Israel is supplying the latest technology that ranges from Green Pine radars and Barak anti-missile systems to Searcher-11 and Heron UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and ship-borne electronic warfare systems. A major project is in place to modernize the Indian army, which includes night-vision capabilities, Tavor-21 5.56mm standard assault rifles, Galil 7.62mm sniper rifles and advanced VHF radios. The Mukherjee-Rumsfeld agreement in June this year is also expected to open up new vistas for India. The deal is extremely vast in scope and envisages a broad range of joint activities, including engaging in multi-national operations, strengthening the two militaries to promote security and defeat terrorism, and deepening capacity to take on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. A new panel called the defense procurement and production group has been established to oversee defense trade and a joint working group will carry out a mid-year review to be overseen by the US-India defense policy group. Peace may be the motto of the Indo-Pakistani talks, but there is no letting up on the arms race. Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist. ------------------------------- [8] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Aug 16, 2005 Subject: Nuclear Power: No solution to Global Warming The Friday Times, July 1-7, 2005, Vol. XVII, No. 19 http://www.thefridaytimes.com Nuclear power: no solution to global warming M V Ramana There is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of developed countries ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Whatever else one could say about nuclear power in the old days, it was certainly not considered environment-friendly. Over the past few years, however, a number of so-called environmentalists, generally Western, have come out in support of nuclear power as an essential component of any practical solution to global warming. Predictably, flailing nuclear establishments everywhere have grabbed this second opportunity to make a claim for massive state investments and resurrect an industry that has collapsed in country after country due to its inability to provide clean, safe, or cheap electricity. But just as the old mantra "too cheap to meter" proved ridiculously wrong, the claims that nuclear energy can contribute significantly to mitigating climate change do not bear scrutiny. Most prominent of these so-called environmentalists turned pro-nuclear advocates is James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-regulating organism. Last year he entreated his "friends in the [Green] movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy." Lovelock's article had several factual errors. For example, "nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources" One wonders which of the many renewable energy sources promoted by the Green movement - photovoltaics, wind energy, and so on - has had an accident that even remotely compares with Chernobyl. Even more inexplicable is the assertion: "We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen." Despite such nonsense, Lovelock's article was circulated widely, both by the nuclear lobby and by other environmentalists who were either confused or felt that this sort of argument had to be refuted strongly. Lovelock's bloomers aside, the fact that some environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as a solution to global warming deserves serious consideration and response. The enormity of the potential impact of climate change adds to this imperative. Two implicit but flawed assumptions underlie most claims about the significance of nuclear energy for the climate-change issue. The first is that climate change can be tackled without confronting and changing Western, especially American, patterns of energy consumption - the primary causes and continuing drivers for unsustainable increases in carbon emissions and global warming. This is plain impossible; there is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of Western/developed countries. Efforts by various developing countries to match these consumption levels only intensify the problem. The second flawed assumption is that the adoption of nuclear power will lower aggregate carbon emissions. In a strictly technical sense, each unit of electricity produced by a nuclear plant would cause the emission of fewer grams of carbon than a unit of electricity generated by thermal plants. (A false myth often propagated by the nuclear lobby is that nuclear energy is carbon free. In reality, several steps in the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to enrichment to reprocessing, emit copious amounts of greenhouse gases.) And so, the assumption goes, installing a large number of nuclear power stations will lower carbon emission rates. The problem is that the assumption holds true only if all else remains constant, in particular consumption levels. But that is never the case. In fact, there is no empirical evidence that increased use of nuclear power has contributed to actually reducing a country's carbon dioxide emissions. The best case study is Japan, a strongly pro-nuclear energy country. As Japanese nuclear chemist and winner of the 1997 Right Livelihood Award, Jinzaburo Takagi pointed out, from 1965 to 1995 Japan's nuclear plant capacity went from zero to over 40,000 MW. During the same period, carbon dioxide emissions went up from about 400 million tonnes to about 1200 million tonnes. There are two reasons why increased use of nuclear power does not necessarily lower carbon emissions. First, nuclear energy is best suited only to produce baseload electricity. That only constitutes a fraction of all sources of carbon emissions. Other sectors of the economy where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted, such as transportation, cannot be operated using electricity from nuclear reactors. This situation is unlikely to change anytime in the near future. A second and more fundamental reason is provided by John Byrnes of the University of Delaware's Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy, who observed that nuclear technology is an expensive source of energy service and can only be economically viable in a society that relies on increasing levels of energy use. Nuclear power tends to require and promote a supply-oriented energy policy and an energy-intensive pattern of development. The high cost of nuclear power also means that any potential decreases in carbon emissions due to its adoption are expensive, certainly higher than energy efficiency improvements as well as other means to lower emissions from thermal power plants. One other argument advanced by some of these so-called environmentalists is that nuclear power is just an interim solution while better solutions are worked out. The idea is wholly at odds with the history of nuclear establishments around the world and completely underestimates the remarkable capabilities of powerful institutions to find resources for continuing existence and growth. Once such institutions are established, they will find ways to ensure that they are not disempowered. For nuclear power to make a significant dent in global warming, nuclear capacity must grow manifold (ten-plus). The notion that nuclear power can increase manifold from current levels and then be phased out is wishful thinking, to say the least. Such a projection also completely ignores existing realities - uncompetitive costs, safety concerns, the unresolved problem of radioactive waste, and the link to the bomb - that come in the way of any significant expansion of nuclear power. Global warming is a serious issue. Providing ill-thought out answers is no way to address such a grave problem. ---------------------------------------------- [9] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Aug 16, 2005 Subject: Petition in support of Cindy Sheehan Good Folks, Please sign and distribute this petition widely. It is in support of Cindy Sheehan's request to speak with bush. Although, amongst the responses there are quite a few right wing attempts to quell the storm that is Cindy Sheehan, there are mostly gems within the comments of the signatures. Please sign this petition in support of Cindy Sheehan. Pass it around. Click on the link to go to the petition page. ....... http://elandslide.org/elandslide/petition.cfm?campaign=cindy Thanks! Until Peace! Richard Sackett |
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| << August17, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]Hinduism & Vaiolence,Parvez posts etc |
August17, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]DELHI??™S TRYST WITH POWER PRIVATISATION >> |
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