UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, August 18, 1997
11A
Nuclear threat, terrorism major concerns
Both situations highly possible
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — To moviegoers, it sounds like a summer blockbuster: Terrorists threaten the nation's capital with a nuclear weapon.
To U.S. policy makers, it sounds like an increasingly possible scenario.
"People don't understand the enormity of the national security threats out there," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., a foreign policy and arms control expert. "We need to be vigilant: This is not a time to go to sleep at the switch."
Former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who is writing a book titled "Six Nightmares" detailing major threats to the U.S. government, let slip that one involves a blackmailing nuclear terrorist.
"You'll just have to wait for the book," Lake said of his other nightmare visions, explaining his publisher won't let him give a preview
National security experts list these as the top modern menaces:
—Weapons of mass destruction —nuclear, biological and chemical devices that can kill huge numbers of people and, in some cases, do immense physical damage.
—Terrorism, domestic and foreign.
-Narcotics traffic and international crime.
—Global conflicts — from beligrents in the former Yugoslavia and Russia, to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, to Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula and around disputed China Sea territories.
"People are most afraid of the nuclear scenario, but biological weapons produce the same number of kills and are very easy to put together," said Robert Kupperman, a terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "You could just go over a major city and spray."
What-would-happen-if scenarios have no limit.
Imagine the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building blast with a nuclear component or a toxic cloud.
In the latest apparent terrorist threat.
Anthony Lake
two Palestinians were shot and arrested July 31 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and accused of plotting to blow up a New York City subway station with nail-loaded pipe bombs. Police said they found a note that vowed to burn the ground under America if six jailed Islamic militants weren't freed. An FBI theory stated the goal actually was extortion, the suspects seeking a $2 million reward from the State Department's program that buys information about terrorists.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. representative to the United Nations, warns of growing ranks of extremist terrorists, both freelancers and those backed by nations such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
"I think it's related — outlaw nations working all the time to acquire weapons of
Richard Lugar
mass destruction and the continued spread of a kind of radical extremism, carried on often in the name of Islam," Kirkpatrick said.
As the United States and Russia – the only major nuclear powers – reduce their arsenals, Washington is working to prevent other nations from developing such weapons, especially rogue states.
In June, President Bill Clinton, at a Denver summit with world leaders, emphasized how America has enlisted other nations to fight nuclear terrorism, including tightened controls on plutonium stockpiles and a rapid-response network to prevent nuclear smuggling.
Congress, meanwhile, has ratified
a treaty outlawing use, development, production, possession and transfer of chemical weapons. More than 80 other nations have ratified it.
Stopping rogue states from gaining weapons of mass destruction is not a straightforward matter. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has praised China for cooperating with the United States to contain North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program. At the same time, the CIA considers China the world's leading exporter of technology for weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear missiles.
The CIA lists Iran and Pakistan as leading buyers — from Chinese and Russian sources — of materials that could be used in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
India, which has warred with Pakistan three times since 1947, has resumed its long-range ballistic missile program. India exploded a nuclear device in 1974.
The CIA, which focused on the Soviet threat during the Cold War, has now turned its attention to individuals worldwide involved in terrorism, weapons proliferation and drug trafficking, said CIA director George Tenet. The FBI, which in 1994 got worldwide jurisdiction under U.S. law over the federal crime of terrorism, is working with the CIA as it opens two dozen overseas offices.
On narcotics and organized crime, law enforcers are cracking down on networks among the Italian Mafia, Russia mobs, Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads and Colombian and Mexican drug lords.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., detailed in his book "The New War" what he called the web of crime that threatens America's security." As an example, he wrote of a Russian hit man sent to New York City to kill an uncooperative store owner. The shooter got fake papers by supplying the Sicilian Mafia with Soviet Army surplus ground-to-air missiles to smuggle into the Balkans to supply the Bosnian Serbs with the firepower to take on U.N. security forces."
Children organize march against the death penalty
"America is the great prize for criminals," Kerry concluded.
The Associated Press
FARMINGTON, Pa. — Elevenyear-old Vernita Arnold proudly shows off a stack of colorful drawings from her best pen pal, Danny Gwynn.
Most of Gwynn's drawings are of flowers and birds but one stands out with images of bricks and flames. The artist, a former crack addict, is on Pennsylvania's death row for setting an apartment building fire that killed a woman.
Vernita, a member of the pacifist Christian Bruderhof community has never asked him about his crime and knows only that he is sorry.
"The government is killing people to show them killing is wrong."
Like their spiritual relatives, the Amish, the Bruderhof communities don't allow television and shelter their children from violence.
Lauren Bruce
Bruderhof child
However, they are politically active, and Vernita and fellow sixth-grader Sandra Scott were so impressed by Gwynn and other death-row inmates that they organized a 30-mile, three-day march against capital punishment.
They expect at least 500 people to join them in their "Children's Crusade to Death Row," heading to the Greene State Prison near Waynesburg.
Most will be children from other Bruderhof communities in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and New England. They expect to be
joined by non-Bruderhof school groups from Philadelphia and New York City, by families from Virginia, Massachusetts, the district of Columbia, West Virginia and Indiana.
Despite living in a world that shuns television, the 200 children at the New Meadow Run and Spring Valley Bruderhof communities in Farmington, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, have waged a high-tech public relations campaign for the march.
Phone calls, faxes, e-mails and even a Web site have helped get the word out. Bruderhof students painted signs and wrote and recorded 16 songs that will be played during the march. They hope donations and sales of T-shirts, buttons and audio tapes will cover most of the $40,000 cost of feeding, housing and promoting the marchers.
The Bruderhofs have eight communities that claim about 3,000 members overall. Founded in the 1920s in Germany, they are an offshoot of the Anabaptist movement that includes the Amish and Mennonites, and believe in simple living centered on work and family.
Vernita and Sandra, fervent in their opposition to the death penalty, are unsure what crimes their pen pals have committed.
"We don't talk to them about that," said freckle-faced Sandra.
"It makes them sad," Vernita adds.
It makes them said, *vernia audae.*
"He probably is guilty," Vernita said of Gwynn, "but he definitely is sorry for what he has done."
The children's zeal and naivete about their pen pals have provoked rage from victims' relatives. Some have confronted the students at rallies outside prisons and others have called or written to complain.
The Bruderhof children involved in the march stress their sympathy for crime victims' families but hold fast to meticulously outlined arguments against capital punishment.
"The government is killing people to show them killing is wrong," said Lauren Bruce, 13.
"We don't want them to be free necessarily, but we say they should be reformed," said Christina Swinger, 14.
Virginia Military Institute ends males-only enrollment policy
Same discipline to apply to women
The Associated Press
LEXINGTON, Va. — Jen Jolen grew up just over the mountains from the Virginia Military Institute, keenly aware it was a place where only the strong succeed. This week, she tests her own strength.
She and 30 other young women will end VMI's 158-year males-only enrollment policy when they report to the campus today.
"It's scary, it really is," Jolen said. "Anybody who says they're not scared is crazy."
For that matter, VMI, the last state-supported college to exclude women. is anxious, too.
No one here wants to suffer the scandals that beset The Citadel after Shannon Faulkner in 1995 became the first woman to enroll at the South Carolina military college.
The federal government battled in court for six years to force VMI to accept women and will watch closely for any sign females are being treated unfairly. VMI is under court order to file quarterly progress reports.
VMI spent millions of dollars
fighting a justice Department lawsuit filed in 1989 on behalf of a still unidentified Virginia woman who was denied admission. Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that if the school accepts tax money it must accept women.
VMI conceded defeat but refused to soften its rigid discipline. Women will wear the same drill uniforms and buzz haircuts as the men. They will live in spartan barracks. No lipstick. No jewelry. No dating upperclassmen.
After VMI's Board of Visitors voted 9-8 last September to accept women rather than go private to stay all-male, Superintendent Josiah Bunting set in motion detailed planning for the transition.
Last semester, with The Citadel reeling from accounts that male cadets had tormented and driven away two female freshmen, Bunting required all 1,200 cadets and 400 employees at VMI to undergo a coeducation orientation and attend seminars on sexual harassment and fraternization.
"If you see something happen that is untoward, you must act," Bunting warned the cadets. "Any activity that is seen to be nefarious or untoward will be on CNN in Sacramento five minutes after it
happens in Lexington."
"All eyes are on VMI," said Kevin Trujillo, this year's senior class president. "Some are just salivating at the thought of our failure. All it will take is the mistake of one person."
Bunting has met many of the incoming freshman women and is impressed with them.
Bunting's warning to the men of VMI is explicit.
"If someone misbehaves or, God forbid, if someone sexually harasses or physically hazes a cadet or anything like that, they will be punished immediately and severely," he said. "I will not stand for it."
Some older cadets worry that the in-your-face discipline and physical, mental and emotional rigors placed on all freshmen may come across as sexual harassment. At VMI, freshmen are known as rats, and for six months, their lives resemble Marine Corps boot camp with a heavy dose of academics.
They must crisply salute upper-classmen and obey their orders. An incorrect answer about VMI trivia puts them on the ground doing pushups. They walk everywhere like automatons, arms held straight and unmoving at their sides and chins tucked against their chests.