Dr. Brian O'Leary, June 2003 (portions excerpted from Re-Inheriting the Earth)
Some of us are in the process of starting a new organization. The basic premises of what we are attempting to do follows. These documents will be updated as we proceed, and suggestions are welcome.
The New Energy Movement is a broad-based public movement dedicated to the study and promotion of peaceful and sustainable solutions for an imperiled planet. We believe the solutions are there if we adopt sensible public policies. Examples include the support of clean and renewable energy of all kinds, and the conservation and recycling of energy, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, water, soil, wood and minerals. We recognize that, for our own survival, these are physical problems demanding physical solutions with target timelines that could be realistically met to avoid catastrophe, which no amount of political, economic, legal or media manipulation could undo. We believe that toxic and greenhouse emissions should and could be reduced to zero by 2020.
We seek to work in concert with existing environmental, educational, business and governmental groups, other progressive movements, NGOs and individuals who agree with these goals, without prejudice or vested interest as to the best means of accomplishing them. We seek public jurisdiction overquestions of peace and sustainability. In the short term, this would mean a shifting of federal subsidies and research programs from polluting fossil and nuclear fuels to clean and renewable energy.
We support a massive shift of federal priorities from weapons programs to an Apollo program which would implement sustainable solutions and domestic needs. We would convert most military personnel into an Earth Corps, in addition to the Peace Corps, to carry out the job of restoring the Earth's biosphere.
We also support strong anti-trust legislation and an increase in health, education and veterans' benefits. Not one job needs be lost nor taxes increased in the process. We seek lasting public policy measures which would ensure sustainable practices and the end of warmongering, tyranny, greed and pollution.
Background
The world is addicted to fossil fuels and America leads the way. With 5% of the world's population we consume over 25% of global energy, most all of it in nonrenewable resources. The U.S. now uses up as much energy as the entire world did in 1950.
This need not be so.
The routine burning of oil and coal has killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide during this past century from toxic pollution in the atmosphere. Two hundred million more individuals have died by homicide, including wars. That means that very few seconds someone needlessly perishes from breathing foul air or becomes a victim of a weapons assault.
This need not be so.
None of this includes the effects of global climate change induced by the routine burning of fossil fuels. It is the overwhelming consensus of more than 2500 atmospheric scientists, on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that we are well into global warming and climate change. There is more carbon dioxide, 30% increase over 1900 levels, in the Earth's atmosphere than there has been for 160,000 years.
As a result, polar ice melts, sea levels rise, airborne diseases head north, and storms intensify. Even more loss of life (than tallied above and accelerating), limb and property has brought on a tenfold increase in disaster relief spending over the past thirty years globally.
All this need not be so.
Clean and renewable energy is now feasible, and new options researchable. We can supplant the fossil fuel industry by public acclaim.
The energy industry and related infrastructure (financial, media, government to name a few) are more powerful, wealthy and unassailable than any enterprise in world history. Petroleum alone consumes $2 trillion per year. The collusion of these industrial giants with government, warned about by so many former U.S. presidents, is now so massive that an Empire is now forming in our own nation, one so powerful that we citizens cannot prevent our tainted leaders from going to war over oil let alone develop clean and renewable energy.
Why is it we cannot by our simple vote and consensus, shift public subsides and research funds from the fossil fuel and nuclear industries to clean and renewable energy options, an amount totaling over $50 billion each year? Why do we tolerate the increased public spending on oil, gas, coal and nuclear subsides and weapons? The Enron corporation's egregious violation of the public trust, and its friendship with the Bush administration, is but the tip of the iceberg of what fossil fuel greed can do. Another is the war in Iraq and projected cleanup contracts shared by the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel.
All this need not be so.
Nuclear power, comprising only 7% of America's energy mix, may not pollute the atmosphere when everything is running well, but its dangers have become legendary: power plant failures such as Chernobyl, the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide, and the lack of an uncontaminated burial of long-lived radioactive waste that would be with us for 25,000 or more years.
This need not be so.
Returning to our oil and natural gas supplies, we are on such a binge now, most all of it will be gone by the year 2050. Our masters have rigged the market so we pay whatever the supply and demand can endure, and the supply is inevitably going down, within this decade. So fast is this depletion that we scrap for the remaining reserves, mostly in the Middle East, at our risk and peril. We threaten the pristine Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to provide 1% of our projected oil needs. We threaten coups in Venezuela and bribe the Middle East oil fiefdoms.
All this need not to be so.
Even if a new oil bonanza were to occur, say a huge discovery of twice or even ten times the known reserves, we extend our oil supply just a few years, maybe even a decade or two. So what? Here we have a resource, formed painstakingly in the eons, in the crust of the Earth, wrung out in one greedy glut lasting a mere century, a span we are curiously in the middle of, a span so short compared to the time this lifeblood of the Earth was formed. In our thirst for energy and military superiority, we are stealing the Earth from our children, as explained by the late David Brower.
This need not be so.
The Energy Solution
It need not be so, because clean and renewable energy waits patiently in the wings for its opportunity. Scholars have already determined that a solar-hydrogen economy, for example, would be cheaper than a petroleum economy-plus-pollution economy, amortized after a few years. Whether the source be the sun, the wind, hydrogen fuel, cold fusion or space or zero point energy, it's there waiting for us to begin what has to be the greatest public project ever. This project will, and must, supplant any previous notion we might have on what to do with the energy picture. And it must be in the public trust; otherwise, the exploitation and wars and pollution will continue. Would you trust your own future to the CEOs of an Enron, Exxon or Halliburton-turned-U.S. vice president?
We therefore form a movement which would publicly support those energy alternatives which could create a clean and renewable energy system, without prejudice.
In 1975, I was Congressman Morris Udall's energy advisor when he ran for president. I also orchestrated hearings and reports for his Subcommittee for Energy and the Environment of the U.S. House Interior Committee. We envisioned a clean and renewable energy economy by the year 2000.
Something funny happened on the way to the vision. From the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the whole environmental movement was derailed and relegated to courtrooms and boardrooms-not policy-making, which has been very bad indeed for the environment and for our survival. This regrettable situation has remained until today.
The basic result of all this is a disenfranchisement of the American public, the erosion of the Constitution, and the suppression of alternatives.
We therefore must form the New Energy Movement, the political arm of a worldwide effort to ensure the development of clean and renewable energy for the world as soon as possible. We are confident that such resources could be developed with moderate public funding, and this could soon supplant our fossil fuel/nuclear industries.
So what are the clean and renewable options? While I worked with Udall, it was obvious to me we could have a solar/wind/hydrogen economy to supplant our fossil fuel/nuclear economy within years, and that the new system would be more cost-effective, especially when the costs of pollution were included, costs which have always been externalized and therefore not considered part of the economy.
Meanwhile, an enormous number of alternative "new" clean and renewable energy concepts have been researched--cold fusion, advanced hydrogen technologies and zero-point, or space, energy. Any one of these approaches could change the world. All have been suppressed by governmental and industrial secrecy. Any one could supplant the largest industry of all time, the oil industry, and therefore has met with the greatest possible resistance. It is acknowledged that some could present great dangers, such as weapons use, which must be discussed as a public (not private) concern.
People often ask, if free energy is feasible, why don't we have it? Why can't I go out and buy one? The answer is, we are in the research phase of a research and development cycle. Asking for free energy now would be like asking the Wright Brothers to deliver millions of passengers and mail each day.
It is for that reason that venture capitalists, seeking to become the Bill Gates of free energy, have stopped short of funding the research and development needed. They are waiting to "dip into the river of optimized profits." Such efforts, so far unsuccessful, demand that the public sector fund any progress. And the government has done nothing about it, something we must redress.
The New Energy Movement would encourage public debate and discussion as to which new energy alternatives would present a safe direction for humanity. What we have now is unsafe and encourages the accumulation of wealth while discouraging innovation.
The New Energy Movement therefore needs to be open to a large range of clean and renewable options, as in the Apollo program. We wish to work with all viable inventors and concepts. It also needs to be aware of what it will take to make the necessary conversions from a polluting energy economy to an emissionless energy economy. We believe that with a concerted effort, conversion can be complete by 2020 on a global level, given a turnabout in U.S. energy policy. We are committed to develop the infrastructure and blueprint, which consists of the following:
(1) Support research, development and public demonstrations of selected new energy devices and infrastructures;
(2) Support, select and demonstrate commercial prototypes;
(3) Develop a plan which would consider the proper mix of innovative energy technologies with the more conventional renewable technologies such as solar and hydrogen;
(4) Develop a plan to retrofit and otherwise convert polluting technologies into clean and renewable ones in all relevant sectors: transportation, power generation, heating and cooling of buildings, etc.; and
(5) Oversee the conversion process.
We therefore set as a goal an emissionless global energy economy by 2020.
To those ends, we commit to ensuring the public funding of the needed shift in subsidies, to support the research, development and demonstration of viable alternatives, and to stimulate debate on options and implementation.
We challenge all the suppression and empire epitomized by the Bush administration. We believe that with a simple shift of public subsidies from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to sustainable energy, we could be well on our way to a clean and renewable energy economy. It could also provide the prototype of what needs to be done to preserve, restore and sustain the Earth's biosphere.
Each day, billions of dollars are being spent on the public support of war and the consumption of polluting energy. That can be reallocated to a clean and renewable energy economy and health and environmental protection.
The New Energy Movement will garner the public to make sure this will happen.
Food for Nukes?
By Claudia Rosett,
The Wall Street Journal,
February 18, 2006.
It's bad enough that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is starving his people while building nuclear bombs. But why are we helping him?
In theory, we're not. But the U.S. has been by far the largest donor to the aid appeal under which the U.N. World Food Program has shipped $1.7 billion worth of rice, corn, wheat and sugar into North Korea over a decade. Last summer the regime declared itself self-sufficient in food, ordering the WFP to wind down operations by the end of the year. But North Korea also let the WFP know that it would be happy to start receiving aid for state-run development projects. Obediently, the WFP has come up with a plan, awaiting approval from its executive board this coming week, to "work with the Government to support its strategy of moving towards development and away from humanitarian assistance." The "Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation" has a $102 million budget to deliver food and "transitional assistance" for Pyongyang's "strategy for recovery."
What Kim hopes to recover is his grip on a population that, despite North Korea's secret police, gulag and public executions for "crimes" such as trying to flee the country, has been slipping ever so slightly out of his control. Last fall, Pyongyang shut down the private grain exchanges that over the past three years had offered some crude semblance of market activity in the world's most rigidly ruled society. Now Pyongyang is trying to put back together its old state-run public distribution system. The WFP, which never actually closed its office in Pyongyang, is there to help.
But is North Korea's idea of "development" friendly to the interests of the free world or its own people? For the past 20 years, the regime has played a canny game of hinting that it is about to reform -- only to extort whatever it can, and clamp down again, pursuing its ballistic missile and nuclear bomb projects along the way. Optimists point to China's market reforms, and such North Korean exploits as Kim's semi-secret train trip last month to China. They forget that in China reform began only after Mao's death in 1976 allowed a change in leadership.
Since North Korea's inception as a totalitarian state in 1948, Pyongyang has had only two rulers -- Kim Il Sung (installed by Stalin) and his son, Kim Jong Il, who took charge after his father's death in 1994. The junior Kim's record over the past dozen years is not one of reform, but of brutality, duplicity and blackmail.
What brought significant Western aid to North Korea in the first place was a nuclear-freeze deal proposed in 1994 by Jimmy Carter. Kim cheated on the deal, pursuing nukes while starving to death an estimated two million North Koreans -- using the state distribution system to decide most expeditiously who would die. Foreign aid workers found themselves up against the policy of songun, meaning the army gets top priority. Some left: Médecins Sans Frontières pulled out in 1998, having concluded that "its assistance was not reaching the most vulnerable people, and was, on the contrary, helping to feed the regime oppressing them." MSF instead devoted its efforts to helping North Koreans who fled the country.
The WFP plowed ahead, trying to outmaneuver the regime on its own turf. North Korea siphoned off aid to the military and the party elite, refused to allow snap inspections, and prohibited the WFP from bringing in native Korean speakers -- leaving them dependent on the regime's translators. In response, the WFP expanded its international staff in North Korea from two to 46, eventually setting up five field offices outside Pyongyang, running a number of food factories and food-for-work programs while bringing in grains less favored than rice in the hope that this would cut down on state diversion of supplies. By mid-2004, the WFP was boasting that it had "gained greater and greater access to the country." To try to stop the regime from diverting aid, the WFP refused to send food to areas where the government barred access.
Since Kim turned up his nose last year, the WFP has been concocting a menu more to his liking. The new WFP proposal states that in compliance with North Korea's wishes, "monitoring will be significantly reduced." There will be no more field offices. Inspection visits will be allowed only four times a year. The government will handle all internal storage, transportation and distribution. The WFP will pay Kim's regime for the favor of storing the free goods, reimburse it for fuel used in transport, and on top of everything else, provide a tip in the form of $3 million for travel, office rent, communications, vehicle maintenance and North Korean "consultants."
If the WFP's new plan goes forward, Kim will be in the pleasant position of receiving free goods, enjoying plenty of control over who gets what, and taking credit for the handouts. Part of the WFP plan, for example, is to provide supplies for food-processing factories where the government will hire the workers, operate the plants, and in some cases -- how many is not clear -- "transport the product to the beneficiary institutions."
There is no question that many people are hungry, and, as the head of the WFP office in Pyongyang, Richard Ragan, described it in a recent interview, "living on the edge." In the field of good works, one of the worst dilemmas is what to do when a tyrant holds hostage his own population -- trading on their deprivation to lever out of well-meaning donors whatever it is he really wants. But in North Korea, the WFP -- America's main conduit for aid into the country -- is losing whatever leverage it ever had. Big brother China and eager-to-appease South Korea are shipping substantial aid with few strings attached. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to corral Kim over matters as mortally important as nuclear bombs. This new program whipped up by the WFP to suit Kim's palate sends just one message: Yes indeed, we are chumps.
Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-resident with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The Wall Street Journal,
February 18, 2006.
It's bad enough that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is starving his people while building nuclear bombs. But why are we helping him?In theory, we're not. But the U.S. has been by far the largest donor to the aid appeal under which the U.N. World Food Program has shipped $1.7 billion worth of rice, corn, wheat and sugar into North Korea over a decade. Last summer the regime declared itself self-sufficient in food, ordering the WFP to wind down operations by the end of the year. But North Korea also let the WFP know that it would be happy to start receiving aid for state-run development projects. Obediently, the WFP has come up with a plan, awaiting approval from its executive board this coming week, to "work with the Government to support its strategy of moving towards development and away from humanitarian assistance." The "Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation" has a $102 million budget to deliver food and "transitional assistance" for Pyongyang's "strategy for recovery."
What Kim hopes to recover is his grip on a population that, despite North Korea's secret police, gulag and public executions for "crimes" such as trying to flee the country, has been slipping ever so slightly out of his control. Last fall, Pyongyang shut down the private grain exchanges that over the past three years had offered some crude semblance of market activity in the world's most rigidly ruled society. Now Pyongyang is trying to put back together its old state-run public distribution system. The WFP, which never actually closed its office in Pyongyang, is there to help.
But is North Korea's idea of "development" friendly to the interests of the free world or its own people? For the past 20 years, the regime has played a canny game of hinting that it is about to reform -- only to extort whatever it can, and clamp down again, pursuing its ballistic missile and nuclear bomb projects along the way. Optimists point to China's market reforms, and such North Korean exploits as Kim's semi-secret train trip last month to China. They forget that in China reform began only after Mao's death in 1976 allowed a change in leadership.
Since North Korea's inception as a totalitarian state in 1948, Pyongyang has had only two rulers -- Kim Il Sung (installed by Stalin) and his son, Kim Jong Il, who took charge after his father's death in 1994. The junior Kim's record over the past dozen years is not one of reform, but of brutality, duplicity and blackmail.
What brought significant Western aid to North Korea in the first place was a nuclear-freeze deal proposed in 1994 by Jimmy Carter. Kim cheated on the deal, pursuing nukes while starving to death an estimated two million North Koreans -- using the state distribution system to decide most expeditiously who would die. Foreign aid workers found themselves up against the policy of songun, meaning the army gets top priority. Some left: Médecins Sans Frontières pulled out in 1998, having concluded that "its assistance was not reaching the most vulnerable people, and was, on the contrary, helping to feed the regime oppressing them." MSF instead devoted its efforts to helping North Koreans who fled the country.
The WFP plowed ahead, trying to outmaneuver the regime on its own turf. North Korea siphoned off aid to the military and the party elite, refused to allow snap inspections, and prohibited the WFP from bringing in native Korean speakers -- leaving them dependent on the regime's translators. In response, the WFP expanded its international staff in North Korea from two to 46, eventually setting up five field offices outside Pyongyang, running a number of food factories and food-for-work programs while bringing in grains less favored than rice in the hope that this would cut down on state diversion of supplies. By mid-2004, the WFP was boasting that it had "gained greater and greater access to the country." To try to stop the regime from diverting aid, the WFP refused to send food to areas where the government barred access.
Since Kim turned up his nose last year, the WFP has been concocting a menu more to his liking. The new WFP proposal states that in compliance with North Korea's wishes, "monitoring will be significantly reduced." There will be no more field offices. Inspection visits will be allowed only four times a year. The government will handle all internal storage, transportation and distribution. The WFP will pay Kim's regime for the favor of storing the free goods, reimburse it for fuel used in transport, and on top of everything else, provide a tip in the form of $3 million for travel, office rent, communications, vehicle maintenance and North Korean "consultants."
If the WFP's new plan goes forward, Kim will be in the pleasant position of receiving free goods, enjoying plenty of control over who gets what, and taking credit for the handouts. Part of the WFP plan, for example, is to provide supplies for food-processing factories where the government will hire the workers, operate the plants, and in some cases -- how many is not clear -- "transport the product to the beneficiary institutions."
There is no question that many people are hungry, and, as the head of the WFP office in Pyongyang, Richard Ragan, described it in a recent interview, "living on the edge." In the field of good works, one of the worst dilemmas is what to do when a tyrant holds hostage his own population -- trading on their deprivation to lever out of well-meaning donors whatever it is he really wants. But in North Korea, the WFP -- America's main conduit for aid into the country -- is losing whatever leverage it ever had. Big brother China and eager-to-appease South Korea are shipping substantial aid with few strings attached. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to corral Kim over matters as mortally important as nuclear bombs. This new program whipped up by the WFP to suit Kim's palate sends just one message: Yes indeed, we are chumps.
Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-resident with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
After the September 11 Tragedy
Foreword from Re-inheriting the Earth
TERRORISM, WAR, AND our unsustainable lifestyles add up to a desperate situation affecting all of us. A global governance structure of some sort will become necessary to overrule the systems we now have. We the people need to have jurisdiction over the survival of civilization while preserving the freedoms of individuals. As never before, we global citizens will need to debate a new constitution based on natural law that would remove human ecocide, excessive competition and violence from the equation. The Earth is in the emergency room and is in need of allopathic solutions, such as a solar-hydrogen or new energy economy to replace fossil fuels. We also need to ban weapons in space and limit them on Earth—before both terrorist and opportunistic economic/military threats overwhelm all of us.
Last century, 200 million people died from assaults by weapons and hundreds of millions more were killed by an increasingly toxic environment. These numbers will surely rise this century without massive public participation at a global level. War and tyranny have always been ways of life. But what is unprecedented is that the actions of war and ecological tyranny could finish us all off. We must be called to civil action as a world community.
The latest environmental news is not good. Even the mainstream consortium, Organization for Economic Cooperation’s recent Environmental Outlook report ( www.oecd.org/env , and www.rachel.org ), gives a chilling set of warnings and new statistics, consistent with what will be presented in this book. They describe how bleak the year 2020 would look if we continue to use up our fossil fuels, continue to release large amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and waterways, continue to ignore the Kyoto agreements on global warming, and continue to deforest, overfish, overgraze, deplete topsoil and water, etc. May this kind of “2020 hindsight” begin to permeate our resolve so that we may avoid catastrophe now, before it’s too late.
The American democracy is in extraordinary trouble. At a time when we could be coming together to render humanitarian aid to helpless refugees in Afghanistan and Iraq rather than bombing them, at a time when we must urgently begin the awesome task of restoring the environment, those controlling our destiny have moved in the opposite direction. While some of us are waving flags and closing ranks behind the Bush administration, the voices of reasoned dissent and openness to solutions have become ever more silenced by a tunnel-visioned American media and a narrowing range of debate which could open awareness of other possibilities. The tragic irony of all this is that it need not be that way, that the terrorists could eventually be brought to justice if only we too were to act justly ourselves. We are creating a nightmare of increasing militarism, fear, greed, secrecy, denial, anger, cruelty, pollution, and the curbing of individual freedom of expression. We are also risking a World War III which could end it all.
There are exceptions to the party line, but you'll have to look to find them. Michael Moore's best-selling underground classic Stupid White Men (Harper Collins, 2002), and the lucid speeches by U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) are examples of unreported yet popular efforts to stop the war machine and re-humanize our culture.
U.S. official policies polarize us not only from Islamic extremists but from the rest of the world. I discovered this sobering fact from extensive recent dialoguing with colleagues and audiences in Europe and the daily exposure to the media abroad. As one British elder stated it, “Americans seem to have lost their sense of identity.” Perhaps the $60 billion implosion of the Texas energy giant Enron, once the seventh largest corporation in the U.S. and critiqued in this book for its questionable practices in California and its close connections with the White House, symbolizes what might happen when winner-take-all capitalism and exploitation of unsustainable natural resources are allowed to go unfettered.
During the autumn of 2001 I was on a lecture tour of Austria, Germany, Scotland, England, France and California on issues relating to this book. Meredith and I had landed in Paris on September 11 within minutes of the terrorists’ horrific attacks on the World Trade Center. Hardly a single European we have encountered out of hundreds of interactions supports the frequent American bombing of innocent civilians in poor countries, military tribunals for accused terrorists, the ignoring of international agreements such as the Kyoto protocols on global warming and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the accelerating toxicity of our environment, the ever-increasing hegemony of giant corporations, the arms trade, plans to deploy space weapons, capital punishment, the suppression of new ideas, the media spin, the inequalities of the rich and poor, and the unbridled power of economic globalization, fast-track negotiations, with no checks and balances coming from an informed public.
The overwhelming consensus among Europeans is that American-led global cartels involving the abuse of dwindling natural capital, energy, money, food, medicine, government, military and intelligence must relinquish their power or the human experiment will have failed.
The common denominator of the current polarization is oil money. Our collective addiction to Middle East petroleum created the powers in charge of both sides of the conflict. We must now act forthrightly to implement solutions that could end this dependence. As never before, we will need to shine a new light on the world stage, a global democracy/republic whose powers will exceed those who are in charge now, regarding the overarching issue of sustainability. We will need to do all this while upholding the rights and freedoms of the meek—rather than of large corporate interests now in control of our destinies.
I shed tears of joyful sorrow over my own version of patriotism on a recent night of listening to jazz in Paris, music which was first composed and performed in America during mid-twentieth century. The spirit of jazz had deeply inspired me during my youth. I had been a proud Eagle Scout and selected as an Apollo astronaut. I wondered, how can we grasp for those straws that represent the best of us? How can we combine our extraordinary creativity and the blessings of nature we still can enjoy into a sustainable plan? Can we transcend our fears, our work frenzy, our grief, for just awhile, to embrace our own greatness and let it propel us forward? Only the formation of a firm resolve to move into solutions, and the tests of time, will tell us. All we need to do is to evaluate and choose which solutions could lead us into a sustainable future with minimal pain of transition. As one colleague put it "Let's have a pos-itive terra-ist attack and planet together."
There is so much unacknowledged in our culture. There is so much unfinished business and exploring and growing to do. Why do we have to commit homicide, suicide, biocide and ecocide to do our business? We need to recognize the severity of human actions, but we also will need to forgive the transgressions and to accept the situation so that we may end our grief and move into solutions.
We need to develop a new global community in both real and virtual spaces. In his classic book The Different Drum, Scott Peck reminds us that community-building includes a chaotic phase which often discourages the founders. This period of ego-posturing usually precedes a surrender to a feeling of emptiness, the next phase. Then it would be possible to enter into the spirit of cooperation and selflessness comprising true community.
Perhaps, in those moments of inspiration, we could turn crisis into opportunity. Perhaps we could express our grief first and then move into responsible and compassionate roles. I hope this book will help shed some light on the solutions themselves. They wait in the wings for their opportunity. In addition, some of us are forming a coalition, which intends to facilitate a new world citizenship which would ensure an enduring civilization through proper human action.
After a death in the family and an unsettled year, Meredith and I have landed on our feet in a place of great natural beauty on the Yuba River near the village of Washington, California. May this New Washington represent the vision for renewed spirit of a peaceful, sustainable and just global future, in sharp contrast to the massive corruption and violence now coming from the old Washington of my past.
Brian O’Leary, Ph.D.
Washington, California.
November, 2002
TERRORISM, WAR, AND our unsustainable lifestyles add up to a desperate situation affecting all of us. A global governance structure of some sort will become necessary to overrule the systems we now have. We the people need to have jurisdiction over the survival of civilization while preserving the freedoms of individuals. As never before, we global citizens will need to debate a new constitution based on natural law that would remove human ecocide, excessive competition and violence from the equation. The Earth is in the emergency room and is in need of allopathic solutions, such as a solar-hydrogen or new energy economy to replace fossil fuels. We also need to ban weapons in space and limit them on Earth—before both terrorist and opportunistic economic/military threats overwhelm all of us.
Last century, 200 million people died from assaults by weapons and hundreds of millions more were killed by an increasingly toxic environment. These numbers will surely rise this century without massive public participation at a global level. War and tyranny have always been ways of life. But what is unprecedented is that the actions of war and ecological tyranny could finish us all off. We must be called to civil action as a world community.
The latest environmental news is not good. Even the mainstream consortium, Organization for Economic Cooperation’s recent Environmental Outlook report ( www.oecd.org/env , and www.rachel.org ), gives a chilling set of warnings and new statistics, consistent with what will be presented in this book. They describe how bleak the year 2020 would look if we continue to use up our fossil fuels, continue to release large amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and waterways, continue to ignore the Kyoto agreements on global warming, and continue to deforest, overfish, overgraze, deplete topsoil and water, etc. May this kind of “2020 hindsight” begin to permeate our resolve so that we may avoid catastrophe now, before it’s too late.
The American democracy is in extraordinary trouble. At a time when we could be coming together to render humanitarian aid to helpless refugees in Afghanistan and Iraq rather than bombing them, at a time when we must urgently begin the awesome task of restoring the environment, those controlling our destiny have moved in the opposite direction. While some of us are waving flags and closing ranks behind the Bush administration, the voices of reasoned dissent and openness to solutions have become ever more silenced by a tunnel-visioned American media and a narrowing range of debate which could open awareness of other possibilities. The tragic irony of all this is that it need not be that way, that the terrorists could eventually be brought to justice if only we too were to act justly ourselves. We are creating a nightmare of increasing militarism, fear, greed, secrecy, denial, anger, cruelty, pollution, and the curbing of individual freedom of expression. We are also risking a World War III which could end it all.
There are exceptions to the party line, but you'll have to look to find them. Michael Moore's best-selling underground classic Stupid White Men (Harper Collins, 2002), and the lucid speeches by U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) are examples of unreported yet popular efforts to stop the war machine and re-humanize our culture.
U.S. official policies polarize us not only from Islamic extremists but from the rest of the world. I discovered this sobering fact from extensive recent dialoguing with colleagues and audiences in Europe and the daily exposure to the media abroad. As one British elder stated it, “Americans seem to have lost their sense of identity.” Perhaps the $60 billion implosion of the Texas energy giant Enron, once the seventh largest corporation in the U.S. and critiqued in this book for its questionable practices in California and its close connections with the White House, symbolizes what might happen when winner-take-all capitalism and exploitation of unsustainable natural resources are allowed to go unfettered.
During the autumn of 2001 I was on a lecture tour of Austria, Germany, Scotland, England, France and California on issues relating to this book. Meredith and I had landed in Paris on September 11 within minutes of the terrorists’ horrific attacks on the World Trade Center. Hardly a single European we have encountered out of hundreds of interactions supports the frequent American bombing of innocent civilians in poor countries, military tribunals for accused terrorists, the ignoring of international agreements such as the Kyoto protocols on global warming and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the accelerating toxicity of our environment, the ever-increasing hegemony of giant corporations, the arms trade, plans to deploy space weapons, capital punishment, the suppression of new ideas, the media spin, the inequalities of the rich and poor, and the unbridled power of economic globalization, fast-track negotiations, with no checks and balances coming from an informed public.
The overwhelming consensus among Europeans is that American-led global cartels involving the abuse of dwindling natural capital, energy, money, food, medicine, government, military and intelligence must relinquish their power or the human experiment will have failed.
The common denominator of the current polarization is oil money. Our collective addiction to Middle East petroleum created the powers in charge of both sides of the conflict. We must now act forthrightly to implement solutions that could end this dependence. As never before, we will need to shine a new light on the world stage, a global democracy/republic whose powers will exceed those who are in charge now, regarding the overarching issue of sustainability. We will need to do all this while upholding the rights and freedoms of the meek—rather than of large corporate interests now in control of our destinies.
I shed tears of joyful sorrow over my own version of patriotism on a recent night of listening to jazz in Paris, music which was first composed and performed in America during mid-twentieth century. The spirit of jazz had deeply inspired me during my youth. I had been a proud Eagle Scout and selected as an Apollo astronaut. I wondered, how can we grasp for those straws that represent the best of us? How can we combine our extraordinary creativity and the blessings of nature we still can enjoy into a sustainable plan? Can we transcend our fears, our work frenzy, our grief, for just awhile, to embrace our own greatness and let it propel us forward? Only the formation of a firm resolve to move into solutions, and the tests of time, will tell us. All we need to do is to evaluate and choose which solutions could lead us into a sustainable future with minimal pain of transition. As one colleague put it "Let's have a pos-itive terra-ist attack and planet together."
There is so much unacknowledged in our culture. There is so much unfinished business and exploring and growing to do. Why do we have to commit homicide, suicide, biocide and ecocide to do our business? We need to recognize the severity of human actions, but we also will need to forgive the transgressions and to accept the situation so that we may end our grief and move into solutions.
We need to develop a new global community in both real and virtual spaces. In his classic book The Different Drum, Scott Peck reminds us that community-building includes a chaotic phase which often discourages the founders. This period of ego-posturing usually precedes a surrender to a feeling of emptiness, the next phase. Then it would be possible to enter into the spirit of cooperation and selflessness comprising true community.
Perhaps, in those moments of inspiration, we could turn crisis into opportunity. Perhaps we could express our grief first and then move into responsible and compassionate roles. I hope this book will help shed some light on the solutions themselves. They wait in the wings for their opportunity. In addition, some of us are forming a coalition, which intends to facilitate a new world citizenship which would ensure an enduring civilization through proper human action.
After a death in the family and an unsettled year, Meredith and I have landed on our feet in a place of great natural beauty on the Yuba River near the village of Washington, California. May this New Washington represent the vision for renewed spirit of a peaceful, sustainable and just global future, in sharp contrast to the massive corruption and violence now coming from the old Washington of my past.
Brian O’Leary, Ph.D.
Washington, California.
November, 2002
Open Letter from Dr. Eugene Mallove
May 13, 2004 (a day before he was murdered)
Universal Appeal for Support
for New Energy Science and Technology
by Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
President, New Energy Foundation, Inc.
Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine
TO ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD who have open-minded curiosity, good will, good judgment, and imagination. To Scientists and Engineers, Philanthropists, Environmentalists, Energy Developers, High Technology Investors, Healthcare Professionals, Journalists, Artists, Writers, Business People, Entertainers, and Political Leaders. Whether you are Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Anarchist, and whether you may be Agnostic, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Atheist, or some other category of spirituality, this message is directed to all people of good will like you...
Dear Friend:
Here are some thoughts by wise thinkers-background for this urgent appeal for your consideration and support of research and development of radically new forms of energy. These are energy sources that have the potential to turn the present world order upside down and bring about a bright new day for civilization:
"The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way. "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
Richard P. Feynman (1963), Nobel Laureate in Physics (1965)
The progress of physics is unsystematic...The result is that physics sometimes passes on to new territory before sufficiently consolidating territory already entered; it assumes sometimes too easily that results are secure and bases further advance on them, thereby laying itself open to further possible retreat. This is easy to understand in a subject in which development of the great fundamental concepts is often slow; a new generation appears before the concept has been really salted down, and assumes in the uncritical enthusiasm of youth that everything taught in school is gospel truth and forgets the doubts and tentative gropings of the great founders in its eagerness to make applications of the concepts and pass on to the next triumph...But each new young physicist...is in danger of forgetting all the past rumination and present uncertainty, and of starting with an uncritical acceptance of the concepts in the stage of development in which he finds them.
Percy W. Bridgman (1961), Nobel Laureate in Physics (1946)
American Nobel Laureate in Physics (1988) Leon M. Lederman is no proponent of research into radical forms of new energy; one might accurately call him a "pathological skeptic" based on at least one opinion he has voiced (see The God Particle, 1993, p.122). Nonetheless, he somehow senses that a physics revolution may be upon us. He said recently, "You can smell discovery in the air...The sense of imminent revolution is very strong." (New York Times, November 11, 2003, p.D12). He is much more accurate than he can imagine, but not at all for reasons that he would readily accept! Perhaps he may be thinking of esoteric academic physics subjects such "string theory" or "cosmic dark energy," but certainly not practical technologies based on radical new physics. Having the intellectual problems identified by physics Nobel Laureate P. W. Bridgman in the quotation above, Lederman has not been looking at a large body of research that will indeed revolutionize the foundations of physics and give us command of fantastic new forms of energy. Too bad for Lederman; and too bad for us all that he has not been paying attention. We could use the support of people like Lederman...if they would only come to their senses, that is, examine open-mindedly the validity of experimental data that challenges their cherished theories.
In an article in Science, November 1, 2002, eighteen experts reported that they examined all the conventionally understood alternatives to fossil fuels and found them all to have "severe deficiencies" in their ability to deal with environmental problems while also being adequate to growing planetary energy needs. Physics Professor Martin Hoffert, leader of that research group, told the press that the United States would have to undertake an urgent energy research crash program, like the Manhattan atomic bomb project or the Apollo lunar missions. According to the New York Times (November 4, 2003, D1), Hoffert stated that we would need "Maybe six or seven of them [massive projects] operating simultaneously...We should be prepared to invest several hundred billion dollars in the next 10 to 15 years." Well, I have news for these experts: The solutions to our energy problems are very close at hand, and they do require initial research and funding, but not the billions of dollars that such Establishment "experts" are accustomed to from government largesse. Rather, all that is needed perhaps are only several tens of millions of dollars to create robust prototype electric power generators based on new energy physics discoveries that have already been made. That is what this Appeal for Support is all about: to raise consciousness and funding for these radical alternative new energy sources.
Question: Do you believe that it is possible that modern science has overlooked or ignored major scientific discoveries, which-if developed into technologies- would revolutionize almost every aspect of civilization? It has!
I will not catalogue the many horrors and troubles of this world that could be reduced or eliminated with an abundant, safe, and clean, radically new form of energy, if it were to be embodied in widely used technologies. You know these troubles already. But I do want to tell you about a significant path toward solving many of these problems, which we can all begin to take now, but about which you may have heard very little. You may have thought that no such path could exist. Let me assure you that it does and that thousands of researchers are already on it. They have traveled this unbeaten path to a new era for far too long without adequate support. I should know, I happen to be one of them. Yes, we have not reached our goals, but thanks to meticulous scientific research, huge sacrifices, and tireless work against great opposition, these objectives are now much closer to being realized. The basic scientific direction of the path forward has already been mapped out. We need your support to go further on the path and reach our common destination: A world of abundant, clean, and safe energy from sources that have no centralized geopolitical control.
Please attend to this appeal. I am most certainly not asking you to accept my claims at face value. But you must read, consider, study or review the compendious referenced material, investigate it, and then, I hope, you will be moved to take action. If you still have questions about these claims that need answering, I and my colleagues are available to answer them with facts, not hand-waving.
Who am I to ask anything of you on behalf of others, whether your attention for these brief moments, or for your financial and moral support? I am a scientist and an engineer with two engineering degrees from MIT (1969, 1970) and a doctorate from the Harvard University School of Public Health (1975). I have worked all my adult life as a dedicated scientist, despite my engineer's stripes. I have always sought to learn how the cosmos really works, and I find this process to be an exciting, difficult, and unending adventure, despite those who so erroneously claim that we are approaching "The End of Science" or a "Final Theory of Everything." Apart from my work in government-funded research at MIT and Harvard and later in corporate settings, I have also broadened my horizons by writing about science as an author and a journalist. Articles by me and about me have appeared in such venues as MIT Technology Review, The Washington Post Sunday "Outlook" section, the New York Times, Popular Science, Analog, TWA Ambassador in-flight magazine, Wired, and New Hampshire Magazine. I have appeared on many national radio programs, and for a time in the mid-1980s I was proud to have been a regular science and technology broadcaster for The Voice of America.
I am telling you something about me, not to elevate myself, but to convey to you something of my experience, sincerity, and integrity. I have written three acclaimed science books for the general public: The Quickening Universe: Cosmic Evolution and Human Destiny (1987, St. Martin's Press), The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel (1989, John Wiley & Sons, with co-author Dr. Gregory Matloff), and Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor (1991, John Wiley & Sons). The late Nobel Laureate in physics (1965) Julian Schwinger endorsed my book Fire from Ice with these words: "Eugene Mallove has produced a sorely needed, accessible overview of the cold fusion muddle. By sweeping away stubbornly held preconceptions, he bares the truth implicit in a provocative variety of experiments." (He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Richard P. Feynman and Sin Itiro Tomanaga.) I am most proud of this latter book, because it began a jarring quest that led to finding out not only dramatic new truths about new accessible forms of energy in nature, but more important for me and you, the following most astonishing truth about modern "official" science: Official science is not really intent on truly expanding scientific knowledge, in particular when some very, very fundamental scientific dogmas and theories are put at risk.
Here is how one famous nuclear science professor at my alma mater MIT reacted to my request to him in 1991 to study the summary reports from two pioneering Ph.D. scientists, who had compiled seminal reviews about frontier experiments in low-energy nuclear reactions (a.k.a. "cold fusion"). One of the reviewing scientists was 34-year veteran researcher at our Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the other was a leader of research at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC):
"I have had fifty years of experience in nuclear physics and I know what's possible and what's not!...I will not look at any more evidence! It's all junk!" -MIT Prof. Herman Feshbach, May 1991, on the telephone to Dr. Mallove
I hope you recognize that the late Professor Feshbach's most unfortunate and ill-considered reaction was fundamentally unscientific. It reminds me of the Church leaders at the time of Galileo, who refused to look through Galileo's telescope at the Moon or at Jupiter, because they "knew" that nothing new could be seen! Yes, many modern scientists are filled with catastrophic hubris; they have become in many ways mere "technicians of science," and guardians of what amounts to a pernicious "Holy Writ." Don't bother me with the experimental evidence, my theory can tell me what is possible and what is not!
If by chance you are one of those who believe that "all is well in the house of science" and that "official science" can be counted on to behave itself and always seek the truth-even in matters of central, overarching importance to the well-being of humankind-you are sorely mistaken, and I could prove that to you with compendious documentation. (If you want to read what happened at just one institution, MIT, when a paradigm shift threatened established hot fusion research programs and "vested intellectual interests" such as those Prof. Feshbach so vehemently defended, read my 55-page report about this monumental tragedy at www.infinite-energy.com.) But as a first step, you should reflect on the broader history of science, which is so fraught with revolutionary leaps and paradigm shifts. These have often been made against great opposition-with revolutionary data staring an older, unaccepting generation of scientists right in the face! Read this Appeal carefully and then reconsider your opinion about who is telling the truth and who is defending falsehood about revolutionary new prospects for science and civilization.
For almost nine years I have been the editor of Infinite Energy, the magazine of new energy science and technology. Though it is now small in circulation, Infinite Energy is received worldwide in some forty countries. And, Infinite Energy is distributed to newsstands across the United States and Canada. My friend and colleague, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, has supported with words and resources some of our efforts on behalf of new energy. The research that Infinite Energy covers suggests that there are at least three major categories of radically new sources of energy that civilization is on the verge of being able to tap and reduce to practical technologies. These are the completely new forms of energy for which this Appeal for Support is being issued. New Energy is the term that we apply to new sources of energy that are currently not recognized as feasible by the "scientific establishment," but for which overwhelming and compelling evidence exists, we suggest, in at least these major categories:
Category 1. New hydrogen physics (a.k.a. "cold fusion," more generally Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions or LENR, "hydrino" physics, and other water-based energy sources. Copious technical and other information about this research may be found on these two diverse websites: www.lenr-canr.org and www.blacklightpower.com as well as our own site, www.infinite-energy.com. The upshot of this energy-from-water field is that within ordinary water there is a heretofore unimaginably large energy reservoir that may be as great as 300 gallons of gasoline energy equivalent within each gallon of plain water! This energy would be non-polluting, would have no hazardous radiation, and would, in effect, have a zero fuel cost. Only one cubic kilometer of ocean water would provide energy equivalent to all the known oil reserves on Earth. In responding to a special plea by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the White House requested from me a technically-based Memorandum on this topic in February 2000. This 8,500-word Memorandum, "The Strange Birth of the Water Fuel Age," was submitted to the Clinton Administration and later to the Bush Administration. It is now posted on www.infinite-energy.com. It asks for a review of the substantial evidence-in particular the copious evidence developed over the past 14 years in U.S. Federal laboratories-for this category of anomalous new physics energy. Unfortunately, apart from polite "Thank You" notes, no discernable action has been taken by either administration. The 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF10) was held near and at MIT in August 2003. Actual public demonstrations of excess energy production in electrolytic cells occurred at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Wall Street Journal science journalist Sharon Begley attended ICCF10 and wrote a fine column in the September 5, 2003 issue of WSJ, "Cold Fusion Isn't Dead, It's Withering From Scientific Neglect." Among other surprising technical developments at ICCF10 was the presentation by a well-funded Israeli corporation, Energetics Technologies, which appears to have made enormous strides in overcoming some of the problems with the low-energy nuclear reactions phenomenon. Isn't it time that the experimental data from this significant field of scientific work is reviewed by an unbiased panel, unlike the rush-to-judgment hostile group in 1989, which inexcusably botched that investigation? Why aren't the many politicians who have been informed about this taking action? Are they perhaps fearful of the all-to-common "sneer review" from the Scientific Establishment?
Category 2. Vacuum energy, Zero Point Energy or "ZPE" for short, aether energy, or space energy. These are descriptions of vast energy sources from the vacuum state. Information about this most radical and paradigm-shattering physics and technology research can be found on websites: www.aetherometry.com, www.energyscience.co.uk, and www.aethera.org. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa in the Toronto area obtained three US patents on an astonishing technological device, the so-called Pulsed Abnormal Glow Discharge (PAGDTM) reactor. In its several embodiments, it already produces kilowatt-level electrical, thermal, and mechanical output power. A Quicktime video of one such device, working in 2003, may be viewed at www.aetherometry.com/cat-abrimedia.html. Successful testing of the PAGD by outside parties, including Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and Ontario Hydro, regrettably did not lead to commercial arrangements to further the development of this scientific wonder, which has been meticulously documented in the three United States-granted Correa patents. (Uri Soudak, former Chief Technology Officer of IAI, is still involved with the project here in the U.S.) The Correas and Dr. Harold Aspden, IBM's former chief of patent operations in Europe (from 1963 to 1983), have provided convincing theoretical explanations, based on concrete experiments with a variety of fundamental phenomena, all of which illuminate how this unsuspected vacuum state energy can be extracted by the PAGD reactor. The advent (possibly in only 2-3 years) of self-sustaining electrical power-generating units in the multi-kilowatt power range appears to be only a matter of gathering a relatively small amount of engineering/scientific development funding, in the low several tens of million dollars range.
Category 3. Environmental energy, i.e. energy from sensible thermal energy (in particular, energy of molecular motion), through significant extensions to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Proceedings of an important scientific conference dealing with this subject gives great insight into this work: Quantum Limits to the Second Law: First International Conference on Quantum Limits to the Second Law (San Diego, CA, July 28-31, 2002), Professor Daniel P. Sheehan, Editor, American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings, #643, 2002. A strong consensus of a significant number of the scientist attendees, as reported by the author, is that it will be possible to make utilitarian machines that convert the thermal energy in the environment to useful work, without a lower temperature reservoir to dump waste heat. This would be in direct contravention of the supposedly sacrosanct Second Law of Thermodynamics. These devices would be nearly perfect "free energy" machines. Accurate simulations of such devices have been carried out and the results published in peer-reviewed journals. Some of the authors predict that such prototype devices could be reduced to small prototype units within five years.
The foregoing brief descriptions of the three categories of New Energy identified so far is only the tip of the iceberg of the verifiable and testable information that is available on these energy sources. It is amenable to critical and precise scientific review. Of course, if the Scientific Establishment trusts only in its textbook theories and if disbelieving people of good will who have the means to move this work forward choose "not to look through the telescope," the consequences will be that these wondrous technologies will not be developed as rapidly as they could have been otherwise-or they may not be developed at all! This has been and will be a monumental tragedy for virtually every category of human experience, all of which would be transformed by these now apparently "unwanted" discoveries.
I could write much more in this memorandum about the corrupt machinations within the supposedly well-ordered and ethical house of science, actions that have kept the information that Infinite Energy publishes from where it should be: prominently considered in such publications as Science and Nature. Don't worry, many, many peer-reviewed technical publications have indeed courageously published pioneering technical papers about new energy, but the prominent mainstream publications that set the boundaries of the public scientific discourse-journals such as Science and Nature-reject without review any and all papers that challenge the foundational paradigms of physics, chemistry, and biology. You may find that difficult to believe, as I would have a mere fifteen years ago when I wrote Fire from Ice, but it is a sad and demonstrable truth. Let us not dwell on that, however, but rather move forward together with an end-run around this grotesque, anti-scientific obstruction.
Infinite Energy Magazine has been published bi-monthly since March 1995 and I have been its Editor-in-Chief and Publisher since that time. It is a technical magazine with editorial outreach to the general public as well. Many of its articles are very accessible to laypeople and non-specialists. You may download for free some 117 pages of representative sample articles, which we have gathered together for you at www.infinite-energy.com. Other key articles are posted for free downloading on our website on a continuing basis. To maintain the highest editorial standards, Infinite Energy is written and edited by scientists, engineers, and expert journalists. It is aimed at pioneering scientists, engineers, business people, environmentalists, philanthropists, and investors who are concerned about an exciting R&D area that we believe will change the world dramatically.
New Energy Foundation, Inc. (NEF) is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) public charity corporation, based in New Hampshire; it has a five-member board of respected citizens. (Prior to July 2003, Infinite Energy had operated under a for-profit corporation.) NEF also has a research grant-awarding function, which was initiated in 2003. NEF dispenses to outside researchers and developers carefully targeted research and development funding grants from its reserves of charitable contributions. These funds are beginning to grow, but are nowhere near the level they need to be.
The current subscription price and newsstand price of Infinite Energy provides less than 30% of what it costs to carry on a publication of this quality at the frontiers of knowledge-and for which no significant advertising base yet exists. And this frontier knowledge is neglected (and not infrequently mocked) by most of the scientific and media establishments. Therefore, charitable contributions are needed to carry on this important information networking function. Here is the other basic motivation for NEF: It has been far too difficult (so far) to persuade venture capital to invest in new energy technology that is not quite ready yet for "prime time," so the vicious Catch 22 ("We won't invest because it is not successful already.") must be broken. We appeal to the humanitarian and charitable instincts of those in a position to invest charitably in and/or to spread the word about the most fundamental aspect of our future: The triumph of truth over falsehood on the frontiers of science-in which the new energy field, in our view, will be the first paradigm-shattering example.
What we have today in the fiery menace of hydrocarbon fuels and its associated geopolitical nightmare is very ugly indeed. There is almost no area of human activity that would not be dramatically affected by the advent of new energy technology-especially matters of war or peace and health and the environment. Therefore, if your review of the referenced material convinces you that this is a reality and not "pathological science," as the unrepentant critics-who have not studied the scientific findings objectively or at all-would have you believe, we hope that you will view your tax-deductible support of the New Energy Foundation as a significant investment in your future, for your loved ones and for civilization at large. Just try to imagine our world twenty or fifty years hence without the advent of a dramatic source of new energy such as low-energy nuclear reactions, aether energy (or Zero Point Energy/space energy/vacuum energy, if you prefer), or some other very powerful new physics energy source. It is not a pleasant picture.
What about solar power, wind power, or hydrogen fuel cells, you ask? Those are fine, and Infinite Energy devotes some smaller space to writing about these. But a future of abundant, clean energy has almost no chance of emerging from the well-intentioned, beneficial, but extremely limited world of wind-power, photovoltaics, hydropower, and other conventional renewables. And the so-called controlled hot fusion tokamak reactor program, which is lavishly funded with billions of dollars by governments to the exclusion of workable new energy science and technology, will never bring about an era of clean abundant energy from the heavy hydrogen in water. Conventional hydrogen fuel cells, which are widely discussed by the news media today, rely on the conventionally understood energy from hydrogen when it combines with oxygen to form water. This is thousands to millions of times less powerful per gram of hydrogen than already demonstrated new energy sources! Furthermore, the hydrogen for conventional fuel cells must come from some other energy source that must be used to break down abundant water to get hydrogen fuel (if we reject the other hydrogen source: hydrocarbon fuel). But in all conventional hydrogen fuel processes using water as the starting material, this requires more energy than one gets back when the hydrogen is consumed. So ordinary "hydrogen power" is a misnomer at best-it is no solution at all to the world's real energy needs. Hydrogen, conventionally employed, is an energy storage medium period. New Energy Foundation supports radically new forms of energy, not the relatively weak examples of alternative energy within conventional renewables. We acknowledge, of course, that there are now no robust new energy devices on the market-not yet. But when adequate, well-targeted research funding is applied, a revolution in energy technology will occur that will dwarf the personal computer revolution in intensity. It will have much in common with that revolution too, since power sources will be highly distributed. The very troublesome and erratic power grid is doomed to obsolescence.
At this time, New Energy Foundation is in need of financial support from a broader community than heretofore. NEF disseminates information about potentially world-changing technologies-about the science, technology, patents, investment, and politics thereof; we measure and investigate new claims about new energy devices to determine whether they are sound. This latter can be tough, because there is no question that there is much bogus "free energy noise" that obscures the good research. Most important, we are now processing grant applications by scientists and inventors from around the world, so that the most promising work-now highly under-funded, due to the very heretical nature of this work-gets the financial support that it so much deserves. We are very demanding about these grants; we insist that the research must be headed in the direction of developing publishable scientific results and/or actual commercially useful technologies that operate on new scientific energy principles
Please help us today, either with your financial contribution-of any size-or by passing along this letter and our message to those who may be better able to help NEF. Whatever you or they can afford, no matter how small an amount, will be deeply appreciated-and will be acknowledged in the pages of Infinite Energy (unless you or others tell us that anonymity is requested). Some day we will live in a world in which the discoveries of New Energy science will be taken for granted. No one will be able to deny the devices, processes, and science, whose validation we are struggling so hard to achieve. In some sense, we will then have succeeded in our mission and thus will have "put ourselves out of business." Those scientific publications and general media, which should have been dealing fairly with this topic all along, will then be forced to write about it and recant past inexcusable excessive skepticism. Billions of dollars in R&D money will then flow from corporations and individuals, as should have been happening already based on what scientists have already discovered! The huge funding for infrastructure conversion to New Energy will flow naturally from private sources, as it has in the rise of the personal computer and Internet industry. Nothing would make me happier than to have that day come. But until then, we very much need increased financial support.
We would like to reach soon our target of at least $500,000 per year in approved research funding for New Energy. That may not seem like a lot of money to do significant research, but let me assure you that even this amount-wisely distributed to the best researchers-could soon begin to have a dramatic catalytic effect. New energy researchers are accustomed to low budgets and are fantastically creative, unlike the wasteful government energy research programs that have demonstrably failed already. It will not be easy to obtain even this level of modest research funding-and, of course, several millions of dollars per year would accomplish much more, but the sooner well-targeted funding reaches under-funded researchers, the more likely we are to accelerate the inevitable New Energy Revolution. Yes, we understand that there is room in parallel for corporate start-ups, and we definitely encourage that to take place. But some of the charitable grant money can help the struggling inventors and scientists to do sufficient research, so that their work can be of greater interest to corporate start-up models.
I think you would agree with me that in these often very dark times the world would benefit immensely from a realistic hope-followed by on-market technology-that a new era of abundant, clean energy resources will be dawning. Please do your best to help us make that happen. Study the hard-won information that we have brought to your attention, if you do not yet accept what I have tried to convey to you. When you have become convinced, if you are not already, please act! You may donate charitably to the efforts of New Energy researchers at www.infinite-energy.com. Please also help us to bring this critical issue to others who may be able to help. Why not satisfy your curiosity and also help New Energy Foundation by subscribing to Infinite Energy. Thank you in advance for joining with us now or in the very near future.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
President, New Energy Foundation, Inc.
Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine
New Energy Foundation, Inc.
(A nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation)
P.O. Box 2816, Concord, NH 03302-2816
Phone: 603-485-4700 Fax: 603-485-4710
www.infinite-energy.com
Universal Appeal for Support
for New Energy Science and Technology
by Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
President, New Energy Foundation, Inc.
Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine
TO ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD who have open-minded curiosity, good will, good judgment, and imagination. To Scientists and Engineers, Philanthropists, Environmentalists, Energy Developers, High Technology Investors, Healthcare Professionals, Journalists, Artists, Writers, Business People, Entertainers, and Political Leaders. Whether you are Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Anarchist, and whether you may be Agnostic, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Atheist, or some other category of spirituality, this message is directed to all people of good will like you...
Dear Friend:
Here are some thoughts by wise thinkers-background for this urgent appeal for your consideration and support of research and development of radically new forms of energy. These are energy sources that have the potential to turn the present world order upside down and bring about a bright new day for civilization:
"The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way. "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
Richard P. Feynman (1963), Nobel Laureate in Physics (1965)
The progress of physics is unsystematic...The result is that physics sometimes passes on to new territory before sufficiently consolidating territory already entered; it assumes sometimes too easily that results are secure and bases further advance on them, thereby laying itself open to further possible retreat. This is easy to understand in a subject in which development of the great fundamental concepts is often slow; a new generation appears before the concept has been really salted down, and assumes in the uncritical enthusiasm of youth that everything taught in school is gospel truth and forgets the doubts and tentative gropings of the great founders in its eagerness to make applications of the concepts and pass on to the next triumph...But each new young physicist...is in danger of forgetting all the past rumination and present uncertainty, and of starting with an uncritical acceptance of the concepts in the stage of development in which he finds them.
Percy W. Bridgman (1961), Nobel Laureate in Physics (1946)
American Nobel Laureate in Physics (1988) Leon M. Lederman is no proponent of research into radical forms of new energy; one might accurately call him a "pathological skeptic" based on at least one opinion he has voiced (see The God Particle, 1993, p.122). Nonetheless, he somehow senses that a physics revolution may be upon us. He said recently, "You can smell discovery in the air...The sense of imminent revolution is very strong." (New York Times, November 11, 2003, p.D12). He is much more accurate than he can imagine, but not at all for reasons that he would readily accept! Perhaps he may be thinking of esoteric academic physics subjects such "string theory" or "cosmic dark energy," but certainly not practical technologies based on radical new physics. Having the intellectual problems identified by physics Nobel Laureate P. W. Bridgman in the quotation above, Lederman has not been looking at a large body of research that will indeed revolutionize the foundations of physics and give us command of fantastic new forms of energy. Too bad for Lederman; and too bad for us all that he has not been paying attention. We could use the support of people like Lederman...if they would only come to their senses, that is, examine open-mindedly the validity of experimental data that challenges their cherished theories.
In an article in Science, November 1, 2002, eighteen experts reported that they examined all the conventionally understood alternatives to fossil fuels and found them all to have "severe deficiencies" in their ability to deal with environmental problems while also being adequate to growing planetary energy needs. Physics Professor Martin Hoffert, leader of that research group, told the press that the United States would have to undertake an urgent energy research crash program, like the Manhattan atomic bomb project or the Apollo lunar missions. According to the New York Times (November 4, 2003, D1), Hoffert stated that we would need "Maybe six or seven of them [massive projects] operating simultaneously...We should be prepared to invest several hundred billion dollars in the next 10 to 15 years." Well, I have news for these experts: The solutions to our energy problems are very close at hand, and they do require initial research and funding, but not the billions of dollars that such Establishment "experts" are accustomed to from government largesse. Rather, all that is needed perhaps are only several tens of millions of dollars to create robust prototype electric power generators based on new energy physics discoveries that have already been made. That is what this Appeal for Support is all about: to raise consciousness and funding for these radical alternative new energy sources.
Question: Do you believe that it is possible that modern science has overlooked or ignored major scientific discoveries, which-if developed into technologies- would revolutionize almost every aspect of civilization? It has!
I will not catalogue the many horrors and troubles of this world that could be reduced or eliminated with an abundant, safe, and clean, radically new form of energy, if it were to be embodied in widely used technologies. You know these troubles already. But I do want to tell you about a significant path toward solving many of these problems, which we can all begin to take now, but about which you may have heard very little. You may have thought that no such path could exist. Let me assure you that it does and that thousands of researchers are already on it. They have traveled this unbeaten path to a new era for far too long without adequate support. I should know, I happen to be one of them. Yes, we have not reached our goals, but thanks to meticulous scientific research, huge sacrifices, and tireless work against great opposition, these objectives are now much closer to being realized. The basic scientific direction of the path forward has already been mapped out. We need your support to go further on the path and reach our common destination: A world of abundant, clean, and safe energy from sources that have no centralized geopolitical control.
Please attend to this appeal. I am most certainly not asking you to accept my claims at face value. But you must read, consider, study or review the compendious referenced material, investigate it, and then, I hope, you will be moved to take action. If you still have questions about these claims that need answering, I and my colleagues are available to answer them with facts, not hand-waving.
Who am I to ask anything of you on behalf of others, whether your attention for these brief moments, or for your financial and moral support? I am a scientist and an engineer with two engineering degrees from MIT (1969, 1970) and a doctorate from the Harvard University School of Public Health (1975). I have worked all my adult life as a dedicated scientist, despite my engineer's stripes. I have always sought to learn how the cosmos really works, and I find this process to be an exciting, difficult, and unending adventure, despite those who so erroneously claim that we are approaching "The End of Science" or a "Final Theory of Everything." Apart from my work in government-funded research at MIT and Harvard and later in corporate settings, I have also broadened my horizons by writing about science as an author and a journalist. Articles by me and about me have appeared in such venues as MIT Technology Review, The Washington Post Sunday "Outlook" section, the New York Times, Popular Science, Analog, TWA Ambassador in-flight magazine, Wired, and New Hampshire Magazine. I have appeared on many national radio programs, and for a time in the mid-1980s I was proud to have been a regular science and technology broadcaster for The Voice of America.
I am telling you something about me, not to elevate myself, but to convey to you something of my experience, sincerity, and integrity. I have written three acclaimed science books for the general public: The Quickening Universe: Cosmic Evolution and Human Destiny (1987, St. Martin's Press), The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel (1989, John Wiley & Sons, with co-author Dr. Gregory Matloff), and Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor (1991, John Wiley & Sons). The late Nobel Laureate in physics (1965) Julian Schwinger endorsed my book Fire from Ice with these words: "Eugene Mallove has produced a sorely needed, accessible overview of the cold fusion muddle. By sweeping away stubbornly held preconceptions, he bares the truth implicit in a provocative variety of experiments." (He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Richard P. Feynman and Sin Itiro Tomanaga.) I am most proud of this latter book, because it began a jarring quest that led to finding out not only dramatic new truths about new accessible forms of energy in nature, but more important for me and you, the following most astonishing truth about modern "official" science: Official science is not really intent on truly expanding scientific knowledge, in particular when some very, very fundamental scientific dogmas and theories are put at risk.
Here is how one famous nuclear science professor at my alma mater MIT reacted to my request to him in 1991 to study the summary reports from two pioneering Ph.D. scientists, who had compiled seminal reviews about frontier experiments in low-energy nuclear reactions (a.k.a. "cold fusion"). One of the reviewing scientists was 34-year veteran researcher at our Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the other was a leader of research at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC):
"I have had fifty years of experience in nuclear physics and I know what's possible and what's not!...I will not look at any more evidence! It's all junk!" -MIT Prof. Herman Feshbach, May 1991, on the telephone to Dr. Mallove
I hope you recognize that the late Professor Feshbach's most unfortunate and ill-considered reaction was fundamentally unscientific. It reminds me of the Church leaders at the time of Galileo, who refused to look through Galileo's telescope at the Moon or at Jupiter, because they "knew" that nothing new could be seen! Yes, many modern scientists are filled with catastrophic hubris; they have become in many ways mere "technicians of science," and guardians of what amounts to a pernicious "Holy Writ." Don't bother me with the experimental evidence, my theory can tell me what is possible and what is not!
If by chance you are one of those who believe that "all is well in the house of science" and that "official science" can be counted on to behave itself and always seek the truth-even in matters of central, overarching importance to the well-being of humankind-you are sorely mistaken, and I could prove that to you with compendious documentation. (If you want to read what happened at just one institution, MIT, when a paradigm shift threatened established hot fusion research programs and "vested intellectual interests" such as those Prof. Feshbach so vehemently defended, read my 55-page report about this monumental tragedy at www.infinite-energy.com.) But as a first step, you should reflect on the broader history of science, which is so fraught with revolutionary leaps and paradigm shifts. These have often been made against great opposition-with revolutionary data staring an older, unaccepting generation of scientists right in the face! Read this Appeal carefully and then reconsider your opinion about who is telling the truth and who is defending falsehood about revolutionary new prospects for science and civilization.
For almost nine years I have been the editor of Infinite Energy, the magazine of new energy science and technology. Though it is now small in circulation, Infinite Energy is received worldwide in some forty countries. And, Infinite Energy is distributed to newsstands across the United States and Canada. My friend and colleague, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, has supported with words and resources some of our efforts on behalf of new energy. The research that Infinite Energy covers suggests that there are at least three major categories of radically new sources of energy that civilization is on the verge of being able to tap and reduce to practical technologies. These are the completely new forms of energy for which this Appeal for Support is being issued. New Energy is the term that we apply to new sources of energy that are currently not recognized as feasible by the "scientific establishment," but for which overwhelming and compelling evidence exists, we suggest, in at least these major categories:
Category 1. New hydrogen physics (a.k.a. "cold fusion," more generally Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions or LENR, "hydrino" physics, and other water-based energy sources. Copious technical and other information about this research may be found on these two diverse websites: www.lenr-canr.org and www.blacklightpower.com as well as our own site, www.infinite-energy.com. The upshot of this energy-from-water field is that within ordinary water there is a heretofore unimaginably large energy reservoir that may be as great as 300 gallons of gasoline energy equivalent within each gallon of plain water! This energy would be non-polluting, would have no hazardous radiation, and would, in effect, have a zero fuel cost. Only one cubic kilometer of ocean water would provide energy equivalent to all the known oil reserves on Earth. In responding to a special plea by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the White House requested from me a technically-based Memorandum on this topic in February 2000. This 8,500-word Memorandum, "The Strange Birth of the Water Fuel Age," was submitted to the Clinton Administration and later to the Bush Administration. It is now posted on www.infinite-energy.com. It asks for a review of the substantial evidence-in particular the copious evidence developed over the past 14 years in U.S. Federal laboratories-for this category of anomalous new physics energy. Unfortunately, apart from polite "Thank You" notes, no discernable action has been taken by either administration. The 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF10) was held near and at MIT in August 2003. Actual public demonstrations of excess energy production in electrolytic cells occurred at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Wall Street Journal science journalist Sharon Begley attended ICCF10 and wrote a fine column in the September 5, 2003 issue of WSJ, "Cold Fusion Isn't Dead, It's Withering From Scientific Neglect." Among other surprising technical developments at ICCF10 was the presentation by a well-funded Israeli corporation, Energetics Technologies, which appears to have made enormous strides in overcoming some of the problems with the low-energy nuclear reactions phenomenon. Isn't it time that the experimental data from this significant field of scientific work is reviewed by an unbiased panel, unlike the rush-to-judgment hostile group in 1989, which inexcusably botched that investigation? Why aren't the many politicians who have been informed about this taking action? Are they perhaps fearful of the all-to-common "sneer review" from the Scientific Establishment?
Category 2. Vacuum energy, Zero Point Energy or "ZPE" for short, aether energy, or space energy. These are descriptions of vast energy sources from the vacuum state. Information about this most radical and paradigm-shattering physics and technology research can be found on websites: www.aetherometry.com, www.energyscience.co.uk, and www.aethera.org. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa in the Toronto area obtained three US patents on an astonishing technological device, the so-called Pulsed Abnormal Glow Discharge (PAGDTM) reactor. In its several embodiments, it already produces kilowatt-level electrical, thermal, and mechanical output power. A Quicktime video of one such device, working in 2003, may be viewed at www.aetherometry.com/cat-abrimedia.html. Successful testing of the PAGD by outside parties, including Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and Ontario Hydro, regrettably did not lead to commercial arrangements to further the development of this scientific wonder, which has been meticulously documented in the three United States-granted Correa patents. (Uri Soudak, former Chief Technology Officer of IAI, is still involved with the project here in the U.S.) The Correas and Dr. Harold Aspden, IBM's former chief of patent operations in Europe (from 1963 to 1983), have provided convincing theoretical explanations, based on concrete experiments with a variety of fundamental phenomena, all of which illuminate how this unsuspected vacuum state energy can be extracted by the PAGD reactor. The advent (possibly in only 2-3 years) of self-sustaining electrical power-generating units in the multi-kilowatt power range appears to be only a matter of gathering a relatively small amount of engineering/scientific development funding, in the low several tens of million dollars range.
Category 3. Environmental energy, i.e. energy from sensible thermal energy (in particular, energy of molecular motion), through significant extensions to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Proceedings of an important scientific conference dealing with this subject gives great insight into this work: Quantum Limits to the Second Law: First International Conference on Quantum Limits to the Second Law (San Diego, CA, July 28-31, 2002), Professor Daniel P. Sheehan, Editor, American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings, #643, 2002. A strong consensus of a significant number of the scientist attendees, as reported by the author, is that it will be possible to make utilitarian machines that convert the thermal energy in the environment to useful work, without a lower temperature reservoir to dump waste heat. This would be in direct contravention of the supposedly sacrosanct Second Law of Thermodynamics. These devices would be nearly perfect "free energy" machines. Accurate simulations of such devices have been carried out and the results published in peer-reviewed journals. Some of the authors predict that such prototype devices could be reduced to small prototype units within five years.
The foregoing brief descriptions of the three categories of New Energy identified so far is only the tip of the iceberg of the verifiable and testable information that is available on these energy sources. It is amenable to critical and precise scientific review. Of course, if the Scientific Establishment trusts only in its textbook theories and if disbelieving people of good will who have the means to move this work forward choose "not to look through the telescope," the consequences will be that these wondrous technologies will not be developed as rapidly as they could have been otherwise-or they may not be developed at all! This has been and will be a monumental tragedy for virtually every category of human experience, all of which would be transformed by these now apparently "unwanted" discoveries.
I could write much more in this memorandum about the corrupt machinations within the supposedly well-ordered and ethical house of science, actions that have kept the information that Infinite Energy publishes from where it should be: prominently considered in such publications as Science and Nature. Don't worry, many, many peer-reviewed technical publications have indeed courageously published pioneering technical papers about new energy, but the prominent mainstream publications that set the boundaries of the public scientific discourse-journals such as Science and Nature-reject without review any and all papers that challenge the foundational paradigms of physics, chemistry, and biology. You may find that difficult to believe, as I would have a mere fifteen years ago when I wrote Fire from Ice, but it is a sad and demonstrable truth. Let us not dwell on that, however, but rather move forward together with an end-run around this grotesque, anti-scientific obstruction.
Infinite Energy Magazine has been published bi-monthly since March 1995 and I have been its Editor-in-Chief and Publisher since that time. It is a technical magazine with editorial outreach to the general public as well. Many of its articles are very accessible to laypeople and non-specialists. You may download for free some 117 pages of representative sample articles, which we have gathered together for you at www.infinite-energy.com. Other key articles are posted for free downloading on our website on a continuing basis. To maintain the highest editorial standards, Infinite Energy is written and edited by scientists, engineers, and expert journalists. It is aimed at pioneering scientists, engineers, business people, environmentalists, philanthropists, and investors who are concerned about an exciting R&D area that we believe will change the world dramatically.
New Energy Foundation, Inc. (NEF) is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) public charity corporation, based in New Hampshire; it has a five-member board of respected citizens. (Prior to July 2003, Infinite Energy had operated under a for-profit corporation.) NEF also has a research grant-awarding function, which was initiated in 2003. NEF dispenses to outside researchers and developers carefully targeted research and development funding grants from its reserves of charitable contributions. These funds are beginning to grow, but are nowhere near the level they need to be.
The current subscription price and newsstand price of Infinite Energy provides less than 30% of what it costs to carry on a publication of this quality at the frontiers of knowledge-and for which no significant advertising base yet exists. And this frontier knowledge is neglected (and not infrequently mocked) by most of the scientific and media establishments. Therefore, charitable contributions are needed to carry on this important information networking function. Here is the other basic motivation for NEF: It has been far too difficult (so far) to persuade venture capital to invest in new energy technology that is not quite ready yet for "prime time," so the vicious Catch 22 ("We won't invest because it is not successful already.") must be broken. We appeal to the humanitarian and charitable instincts of those in a position to invest charitably in and/or to spread the word about the most fundamental aspect of our future: The triumph of truth over falsehood on the frontiers of science-in which the new energy field, in our view, will be the first paradigm-shattering example.
What we have today in the fiery menace of hydrocarbon fuels and its associated geopolitical nightmare is very ugly indeed. There is almost no area of human activity that would not be dramatically affected by the advent of new energy technology-especially matters of war or peace and health and the environment. Therefore, if your review of the referenced material convinces you that this is a reality and not "pathological science," as the unrepentant critics-who have not studied the scientific findings objectively or at all-would have you believe, we hope that you will view your tax-deductible support of the New Energy Foundation as a significant investment in your future, for your loved ones and for civilization at large. Just try to imagine our world twenty or fifty years hence without the advent of a dramatic source of new energy such as low-energy nuclear reactions, aether energy (or Zero Point Energy/space energy/vacuum energy, if you prefer), or some other very powerful new physics energy source. It is not a pleasant picture.
What about solar power, wind power, or hydrogen fuel cells, you ask? Those are fine, and Infinite Energy devotes some smaller space to writing about these. But a future of abundant, clean energy has almost no chance of emerging from the well-intentioned, beneficial, but extremely limited world of wind-power, photovoltaics, hydropower, and other conventional renewables. And the so-called controlled hot fusion tokamak reactor program, which is lavishly funded with billions of dollars by governments to the exclusion of workable new energy science and technology, will never bring about an era of clean abundant energy from the heavy hydrogen in water. Conventional hydrogen fuel cells, which are widely discussed by the news media today, rely on the conventionally understood energy from hydrogen when it combines with oxygen to form water. This is thousands to millions of times less powerful per gram of hydrogen than already demonstrated new energy sources! Furthermore, the hydrogen for conventional fuel cells must come from some other energy source that must be used to break down abundant water to get hydrogen fuel (if we reject the other hydrogen source: hydrocarbon fuel). But in all conventional hydrogen fuel processes using water as the starting material, this requires more energy than one gets back when the hydrogen is consumed. So ordinary "hydrogen power" is a misnomer at best-it is no solution at all to the world's real energy needs. Hydrogen, conventionally employed, is an energy storage medium period. New Energy Foundation supports radically new forms of energy, not the relatively weak examples of alternative energy within conventional renewables. We acknowledge, of course, that there are now no robust new energy devices on the market-not yet. But when adequate, well-targeted research funding is applied, a revolution in energy technology will occur that will dwarf the personal computer revolution in intensity. It will have much in common with that revolution too, since power sources will be highly distributed. The very troublesome and erratic power grid is doomed to obsolescence.
At this time, New Energy Foundation is in need of financial support from a broader community than heretofore. NEF disseminates information about potentially world-changing technologies-about the science, technology, patents, investment, and politics thereof; we measure and investigate new claims about new energy devices to determine whether they are sound. This latter can be tough, because there is no question that there is much bogus "free energy noise" that obscures the good research. Most important, we are now processing grant applications by scientists and inventors from around the world, so that the most promising work-now highly under-funded, due to the very heretical nature of this work-gets the financial support that it so much deserves. We are very demanding about these grants; we insist that the research must be headed in the direction of developing publishable scientific results and/or actual commercially useful technologies that operate on new scientific energy principles
Please help us today, either with your financial contribution-of any size-or by passing along this letter and our message to those who may be better able to help NEF. Whatever you or they can afford, no matter how small an amount, will be deeply appreciated-and will be acknowledged in the pages of Infinite Energy (unless you or others tell us that anonymity is requested). Some day we will live in a world in which the discoveries of New Energy science will be taken for granted. No one will be able to deny the devices, processes, and science, whose validation we are struggling so hard to achieve. In some sense, we will then have succeeded in our mission and thus will have "put ourselves out of business." Those scientific publications and general media, which should have been dealing fairly with this topic all along, will then be forced to write about it and recant past inexcusable excessive skepticism. Billions of dollars in R&D money will then flow from corporations and individuals, as should have been happening already based on what scientists have already discovered! The huge funding for infrastructure conversion to New Energy will flow naturally from private sources, as it has in the rise of the personal computer and Internet industry. Nothing would make me happier than to have that day come. But until then, we very much need increased financial support.
We would like to reach soon our target of at least $500,000 per year in approved research funding for New Energy. That may not seem like a lot of money to do significant research, but let me assure you that even this amount-wisely distributed to the best researchers-could soon begin to have a dramatic catalytic effect. New energy researchers are accustomed to low budgets and are fantastically creative, unlike the wasteful government energy research programs that have demonstrably failed already. It will not be easy to obtain even this level of modest research funding-and, of course, several millions of dollars per year would accomplish much more, but the sooner well-targeted funding reaches under-funded researchers, the more likely we are to accelerate the inevitable New Energy Revolution. Yes, we understand that there is room in parallel for corporate start-ups, and we definitely encourage that to take place. But some of the charitable grant money can help the struggling inventors and scientists to do sufficient research, so that their work can be of greater interest to corporate start-up models.
I think you would agree with me that in these often very dark times the world would benefit immensely from a realistic hope-followed by on-market technology-that a new era of abundant, clean energy resources will be dawning. Please do your best to help us make that happen. Study the hard-won information that we have brought to your attention, if you do not yet accept what I have tried to convey to you. When you have become convinced, if you are not already, please act! You may donate charitably to the efforts of New Energy researchers at www.infinite-energy.com. Please also help us to bring this critical issue to others who may be able to help. Why not satisfy your curiosity and also help New Energy Foundation by subscribing to Infinite Energy. Thank you in advance for joining with us now or in the very near future.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
President, New Energy Foundation, Inc.
Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine
New Energy Foundation, Inc.
(A nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation)
P.O. Box 2816, Concord, NH 03302-2816
Phone: 603-485-4700 Fax: 603-485-4710
www.infinite-energy.com
A Message from Brian O'Leary
For more than thirty years I have studied, taught and advised the U.S. government about clean energy futures. In the process I had begun to understand the depth of our addiction to polluting and unsafe sources such as the fossil fuels and nuclear power. I also grew to appreciate the great potential but also the high cost of switching to conventional renewables such as solar and wind power. This interest had coincided with a nascent robust environmental movement during the 1970s that stoked my vision of a truly clean energy future.
But two unexpected events happened on the way to the vision, one political and the other technical. In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. president rendering flat the clean energy dream, culminating with the oil-soaked energy policies of the Bush II administration. The second were visits during the 1990s to the laboratories of inventors and scientists researching the potential of vacuum ( zero-point ) energy, to satisfy a curiosity I had had that our answers might just lie outside the box of conventional thinking. I traveled throughout North America, Europe, Japan, India, New Zealand to see some truly remarkable demonstrations which were for me a proof-of-concept of breakthrough technologies that , if properly developed, could change the world. These activities also helped lead to the creation of the Institute for New Energy as a spinoff from two historic thinktank retreats in Estes Park, Colorado, under the auspices of the International Association for New Science, where some of the best and brightest new energy scientists from all around the world were gathered. We exchanged research ideas and sought ways of supporting our mutual work . But when our benefactor did not yet see profits coming from the work, he pulled out. Support was thin at best.
To my skeptical mind steeped in mainstream physics, it took some years for me to uncover the principles that could support a new energy revolution. I nevertheless believed these options were promising for relieving the emerging crises of air pollution and global warming/climate change. We should give them a shot. But I also was aware of the dynamics of scientific discovery: that bold new ideas were usually in for a societally-sanctioned paradigm gridlock preventing developments that could be perceived as threatening to the status quo. Around that time, the late Dr. Eugene Mallove at MIT was concluding much the same about cold fusion. A movement seemed to be forming, one largely outside the Scientific Establishment, to research unconventional energy sources.
Alas for a decade we seemed to be thwarted at every turn. University scientists, governent techocrats, investors, media, politicians and even environmentalists spoke with one voice in ignorance about or opposition to the credibility of new energy. Several breakaway scientists and intelligent lay people did embrace some of the revolutionary ideas of Nikola Tesla, placed historically safely one century ago. But the hundreds of Teslas now alive and diligently searching for the ultimate solution to the global energy crisis were being suppressed rather than supported. Why was that happening? And why were we as a culture so slow to innovate ourselves beyond the dirty and dangerous situation we now find ourselves in? What could we do about it? We needed a context for change.
To address this curious situation Alden Bryant and I formed the New Energy Movement in 2003. I started a simple literary website writing and inviting essays on the dynamics of suppression and opportunity in the new energy field. I also began to formulate some of the basic principles of new energy that could be understandable to the layperson, including frequently asked questions,mission statements, looking at the main issues, etc. This naturally led to the conclusion that if the powers-that-be were in fact leading us astray, then we the people would need to do the job the U.S. Department of Energy and profit-driven corporations should be doing but arenÕt, to honestly look at the full range of options without vested interests, and to support the research and development required to implement a truly clean, cheap, safe and decentralized energy future for the Earth.
Thanks to the efforts of NEM board members Wade Frazier and Andrew Mount, and with the webmastering of Yvonne Garcia, then Steve Meyers and now Stas Rutkowski, the website has lurched into the 21sst Century. My initial goal in establishing the site has been to post several topical essays on the social dynamics of new energy. Because many of our board members are well-versed in these matters, some of us hoped that frequently posted articles would attract dialogue, debate and discussion about the role of new energy in transforming our global energy culture and that the word could spread. I am happy to report the hard work of making this site available for such discussions is done. The site can now be a vibrant forum for understanding where civilization could go with this, with the highest level public participation that we could expect from a democratic effort to formulate future energy policies that make sense.
The New Energy Movement held its first conference in September 2004 in Portland, Oregon, ÒNew Energy: The Courage to Change.Ó. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of board members Joel Garbon and Steve Kaplan and a team of volunteers, the consensus among the 300 attendees was that it was a huge success. We will have more conferences. So between the new website and conferences, we are truly launched.
But our work has barely begun and we will need outside support to deepen our understanding of new energy issues. What kinds of energy sources do we really want? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one in terms of feasibility, cost, safety, and full life-cycle environmental costs? Perhaps most importantly, how can we make new energy more credible in the face of overwhelming institutional inertia? I am convinced some day there will be breakthroughs in the form of prototype devices but that will come not only through the dogged work of one or two isolated inventors. It will come only through tiger teams of inventors, engineers, angel benefactors and others who could bring the technologies forward. All this takes the support of the people: ÒIf the people lead, the leaders will follow.Ó To the degree we can grow and become a viable force in the energy field may just make the difference for us and for future generations. So we invite you to jump in and be part of our team, to participate in this grassroots high-leverage creative activity to help heal Mother Earth.
Brian O'Leary, Ph.D.
July 2005
But two unexpected events happened on the way to the vision, one political and the other technical. In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. president rendering flat the clean energy dream, culminating with the oil-soaked energy policies of the Bush II administration. The second were visits during the 1990s to the laboratories of inventors and scientists researching the potential of vacuum ( zero-point ) energy, to satisfy a curiosity I had had that our answers might just lie outside the box of conventional thinking. I traveled throughout North America, Europe, Japan, India, New Zealand to see some truly remarkable demonstrations which were for me a proof-of-concept of breakthrough technologies that , if properly developed, could change the world. These activities also helped lead to the creation of the Institute for New Energy as a spinoff from two historic thinktank retreats in Estes Park, Colorado, under the auspices of the International Association for New Science, where some of the best and brightest new energy scientists from all around the world were gathered. We exchanged research ideas and sought ways of supporting our mutual work . But when our benefactor did not yet see profits coming from the work, he pulled out. Support was thin at best.
To my skeptical mind steeped in mainstream physics, it took some years for me to uncover the principles that could support a new energy revolution. I nevertheless believed these options were promising for relieving the emerging crises of air pollution and global warming/climate change. We should give them a shot. But I also was aware of the dynamics of scientific discovery: that bold new ideas were usually in for a societally-sanctioned paradigm gridlock preventing developments that could be perceived as threatening to the status quo. Around that time, the late Dr. Eugene Mallove at MIT was concluding much the same about cold fusion. A movement seemed to be forming, one largely outside the Scientific Establishment, to research unconventional energy sources.
Alas for a decade we seemed to be thwarted at every turn. University scientists, governent techocrats, investors, media, politicians and even environmentalists spoke with one voice in ignorance about or opposition to the credibility of new energy. Several breakaway scientists and intelligent lay people did embrace some of the revolutionary ideas of Nikola Tesla, placed historically safely one century ago. But the hundreds of Teslas now alive and diligently searching for the ultimate solution to the global energy crisis were being suppressed rather than supported. Why was that happening? And why were we as a culture so slow to innovate ourselves beyond the dirty and dangerous situation we now find ourselves in? What could we do about it? We needed a context for change.
To address this curious situation Alden Bryant and I formed the New Energy Movement in 2003. I started a simple literary website writing and inviting essays on the dynamics of suppression and opportunity in the new energy field. I also began to formulate some of the basic principles of new energy that could be understandable to the layperson, including frequently asked questions,mission statements, looking at the main issues, etc. This naturally led to the conclusion that if the powers-that-be were in fact leading us astray, then we the people would need to do the job the U.S. Department of Energy and profit-driven corporations should be doing but arenÕt, to honestly look at the full range of options without vested interests, and to support the research and development required to implement a truly clean, cheap, safe and decentralized energy future for the Earth.
Thanks to the efforts of NEM board members Wade Frazier and Andrew Mount, and with the webmastering of Yvonne Garcia, then Steve Meyers and now Stas Rutkowski, the website has lurched into the 21sst Century. My initial goal in establishing the site has been to post several topical essays on the social dynamics of new energy. Because many of our board members are well-versed in these matters, some of us hoped that frequently posted articles would attract dialogue, debate and discussion about the role of new energy in transforming our global energy culture and that the word could spread. I am happy to report the hard work of making this site available for such discussions is done. The site can now be a vibrant forum for understanding where civilization could go with this, with the highest level public participation that we could expect from a democratic effort to formulate future energy policies that make sense.
The New Energy Movement held its first conference in September 2004 in Portland, Oregon, ÒNew Energy: The Courage to Change.Ó. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of board members Joel Garbon and Steve Kaplan and a team of volunteers, the consensus among the 300 attendees was that it was a huge success. We will have more conferences. So between the new website and conferences, we are truly launched.
But our work has barely begun and we will need outside support to deepen our understanding of new energy issues. What kinds of energy sources do we really want? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one in terms of feasibility, cost, safety, and full life-cycle environmental costs? Perhaps most importantly, how can we make new energy more credible in the face of overwhelming institutional inertia? I am convinced some day there will be breakthroughs in the form of prototype devices but that will come not only through the dogged work of one or two isolated inventors. It will come only through tiger teams of inventors, engineers, angel benefactors and others who could bring the technologies forward. All this takes the support of the people: ÒIf the people lead, the leaders will follow.Ó To the degree we can grow and become a viable force in the energy field may just make the difference for us and for future generations. So we invite you to jump in and be part of our team, to participate in this grassroots high-leverage creative activity to help heal Mother Earth.
Brian O'Leary, Ph.D.
July 2005
Exploring Earthspace
The Magnetopause:
In the flowing solar wind, as already noted, ions and electrons are strongly tied to their magnetic field lines. If the flow is deflected for any reason, the field lines will also deform, in such a way that each continues to thread the same plasma particles as before. Therefore, when the solar wind encounters the Earth's magnetic field, its particles cannot penetrate: to do so they would have to let go of their interplanetary field lines and instead become attached to those of the Earth.
The two fields thus remain separated. The solar wind pushes back the Earth's field somewhat, but ultimately is forced to detour, leaving the Earth's lines enclosed in a bullet shaped cavity, which on the night side continues as a long cylinder, like the tail of a comet. The boundary surface between interplanetary field lines and those of the Earth is called the magnetopause.
This lack of connection insulates the two regions from each other and makes it difficult for the particles and energy to enter the magnetosphere from the solar wind. One loophole, evident in the picture above, are the polar cusps, points on the magnetopause which separate field lines that close on the day side from those swept into the tail. At the cusps field lines seem to cross each other: that would imply a magnetic force which has more than one direction, and the only way it could happen is when the magnetic intensity drops to zero, i.e. there is no field at those points. Such neutral points are the weak spots of the magnetopause. Satellites which have probed their vicinity found disordered weak fields rather than well-defined neutral points, and a "funnel" of solar wind plasma, penetrating along field lines all the way to Earth.
The cusps are a relatively minor link between the solar wind and the magnetosphere; a much more significant connection was proposed by James Dungey in 1961. Dungey noted that the Earth's field lines near the "nose" pointed northward, and suggested that when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) pointed southward, or had a southward slant (which grows much bigger when the lines get pressed against the boundary), the two opposing fields would cancel out and create a neutral point between them, as in the drawing below, with the point probably extended into a neutral line (a line along which the magnetic field intensity if zero) perpendicular to the drawing.
Dungey's reconnection picture.The laws by which ions and electrons are attached to magnetic field lines break down at neutral points or line, where the field goes down to zero. If the plasma flows through the neutral line, a process known as magnetic reconnection (or magnetic merging) occurs instead. Interplanetary field lines enter from one side, terrestrial ones from the other, each splits into two parts and the halves then reattach in such a way that a northern "open" line forms, half interplanetary, half terrestrial (see drawing below), and similarly on the southern side.
Cartoon of two lines, before, during and after reconnection.Dungey also suggested that such interconnections were temporary, and that after the particles threading a pair of "open" lines moved further downstream, the process was reversed at another neutral line, somewhere in the far tail.
Because open lines extend from the solar wind to Earth, they can effectively transmit plasma and energy from one to the other. Evidence for this appeared in 1966, when it was found that the degree of magnetic "storminess" tended to be much increased whenever the IMF had a southward slant.
Processes at the Magnetopause:
The "nose" of the magnetopause is on the average 10-11 RE (Earth radii) from the center of the Earth, though the distance varies with the speed and density of the solar wind. When these are low, the push of the solar wind is weak and the boundary can move out to 13 RE. On the other hand, the arrival of fast plasma clouds from solar eruptions can push the boundary until it croses the synchronous orbit (almost down to half its usual distance), as may happen a few times a year.
Perspective view of regions of the magnetosphere.Because of the high speed of the solar wind, a bow shock is formed about 3-4 RE outside the nose, like the shock front ahead of a supersonic aircraft. The solar wind just behind the shock (a region called the magnetosheath) is slower, denser and hotter, but as it flows downstream it gradually recovers its normal properties.
Satellites which cross the magnetopause into the solar wind often see an abrupt transition, as Explorer 12 did when the boundary was discovered in 1961. The magnetic field becomes weaker and its direction may drastically shift, while the plasma becomes denser and flows rapidly along the boundary, away from the Sun. Sometimes a boundary layer is encountered between the two regions, a transition region across which the field and plasma properties gradually change.
The inner magnetosphere contains the radiation belts and the ring current, already discussed. It extends approximately to synchronous orbit, sometimes further, and compared to other regions it is rather stable.
The Earth's Magnetic Tail:
While the "nose" of the magnetosphere, facing the Sun, is pushed in, the field lines on the opposite side, facing away, are pulled out into a long tail (see earlier figure).
The largest features of the tail are two oppositely directed bundles of stretched field lines, nearly parallel, extending from Earth to great distances. Field lines of the northern "tail lobe" connect to the vicinity of the northern magnetic pole, and are directed towards the earth, while those in the southern lobe are connected near the southern pole and are directed away. Sandwiched between them is the denser plasma sheet.
To produce these deformations of the Earth's nighside field, additional electric currents are required. It turns out that those currents--quite large ones--flow across the width of the plasma sheet, from edge to edge (see preceding drawing). Once the current reaches the magnetopause, it divides into 2 parts which close around the lobes, over the top and under the bottom of the tail.
Of all the parts of the magnetosphere the plasma sheet is the most dynamic. If one traces its field lines back to Earth, one finds that they land in the "ring of fire" around the pole which is lit up by the aurora, the "auroral oval." Hence the widespread belief that the aurora comes from the plasma sheet, although some might be linked more directly to the solar wind.
James Dungey proposed in 1961 that the Earth's lines could link up with the IMF, producing "open" lines (field lines with one end connected to Earth and the other to the IMF), which are then carried tailward by the solar wind. He also suggested that those lines and their attached plasma (at least in their near-earth parts) sooner or later return to their starting positions, creating a closed cycle. His view was that somewhere in the far tail, northern and southern lines reconnected again, and that the plasma on the reconstituted terrestrial lines then flowed back inside the plasma sheet.
Such a process would predict that satellites observing the plasma sheet would always observe its particles flowing towards the Earth. Earthward flows are indeed observed there; but the picture is not so simple, because the flows are rather irregular and seem to occur mainly in substorms, described in a later section.
Monitoring the Solar Wind:
The magnetosphere is largely controlled by the solar wind: its size depends on the wind's pressure, its activity on the north-south component of the wind's magnetic field. Anyone who wishes to study or predict the behavior of our magnetic environment therefore needs to know the state of the solar wind.
The IMP 8 satellite (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform 8) has been on the job for more than 20 years, sweeping around Earth in a big circle, with a radius of about 35 RE. It continues to provide extensive information about the wind, bow shock, and even about the tail, which its orbit also crosses.
To provide an early warning about the solar wind, however, the best place for a spacecraft is between the Sun and the Earth. Luckily, the gravitational pulls of the two bodies allow a spacecraft to maintain a fixed position between them, at the "Lagrangian point" L1 located 236 RE upstream of the Earth, about 4 times the distance to the Moon. A spacecraft at L1 intercepts the solar wind approximately one hour before it hits Earth and thus can give us a one-hour warning of impending changes.
In 1978 the ISEE-3 spacecraft (International Sun-Earth Explorer 3) was sent to the vicinity of L1, where for a few years it monitored the solar wind, after which it was detailed to explore the far tail; still later it was sent to encounter a comet. Currently (1997) the SOHO spacecraft (Solar ... Observatory) is in such an orbit and observes the solar wind before it reaches Earth, and the Ace spacecraft (Advanced Composition Explorer) is due to join it there. The "Wind" spacecraft, originally scheduled for such an orbit, is still observing the solar wind from its very elongated transfer orbit. Since it has its own propulsion and a large reserve of fuel, it might be diverted to an alternate mission.
Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: education@phy6.org
Co-author: Dr. Mauricio Peredo
Spanish translation by J. Méndez
Last updated 25 November 2001,
Re-formatted 9-28-2004
Iran Sets New Date for Atomic Talks with Russia
By Parisa Hafezi
TEHRAN -- Iran announced on Tuesday it was deferring until next week talks with Russia on its nuclear plans, but gave no sign it was ready to stop enriching uranium on its own soil -- the key element in Moscow's plan.
Russia's proposal to enrich uranium on Iran's behalf is designed to allay world fears about Iranian scientists diverting nuclear material into bombs and to defuse a standoff that has already seen Tehran reported to the U.N. Security Council.
Iranian nuclear negotiator Javad Vaeedi said the talks would now start in Moscow on February 20.
"We still want to reach a formula to prove that we will not divert uranium enriched on Iranian soil," he told reporters.
Russia confirmed that Iran had asked to postpone the talks, originally scheduled for Thursday, until Monday.
"We are trying to agree on whether that date is acceptable for the Russian side," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said, RIA news agency reported.
Iran has already undercut the aim of Moscow's proposal by resuming uranium enrichment in underground facilities near the town of Natanz, arguing the Islamic Republic has every right to purify the uranium it mines in its central deserts.
Iranian officials have said Russia will have to alter its terms to gain Tehran's consent for its proposal.
Diplomats in Vienna, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Tehran wanted to spin out dialogue without committing itself to anything, calculating this could make the Security Council hesitate before taking any action against it.
Western countries suspect Iran is seeking enriched uranium to build nuclear weapons and this month persuaded the IAEA's ruling board to report Iran to the council. Iran denies it wants bombs, saying it needs atomic fuel only for power stations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference in Yerevan there was still room for Iran and Russia to discuss where enrichment would take place.
However, in the past such remarks have indicated Iran's willingness to enrich uranium jointly with Russia, not that it is ready to surrender its right to produce atomic fuel at home.
CALLS FOR DIPLOMACY
Germany and China called for diplomacy to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran.
"The international community should not give up diplomatic efforts under the IAEA's framework," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said. "A solution through dialogue serves the interests of China, Iran and all parties concerned."
German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said: "A military solution is not being discussed right now. I hope that if the international community stands together we can find a solution."
Vaeedi also confirmed that Iran had revived small-scale uranium enrichment, which it had stopped for two and a half years while negotiating with European Union powers.
"The order to resume uranium enrichment has been issued and, in accordance with that, the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization has restarted the process," he told reporters.
Iran's parliament passed a law in November binding the government to resume making atomic fuel and limit cooperation with the IAEA if its case went to the Security Council.
However, Vaeedi said Iran would not be able to reach industrial-scale production of atomic fuel quickly.
"We need some time to reach that level with all centrifuges because of the 2-1/2 year suspension. However, the preliminary phases have been launched," he said.
Centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning it at supersonic speed.
Diplomats said in September that Iran could have serious technical difficulties in enriching uranium on an industrial scale, which requires getting centrifuges to work in cascades.
Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said steps were being taken to limit U.N. observation of atomic facilities, previously allowed by Tehran when it was observing the Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has not ratified the protocol.
"Since the Additional Protocol is not in force any more some of those cameras should be taken out," he told state television.
(Additional reporting by Sophie Hardach in Sestriere, Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Mark Heinrich in Vienna)
Source: REUTERS
TEHRAN -- Iran announced on Tuesday it was deferring until next week talks with Russia on its nuclear plans, but gave no sign it was ready to stop enriching uranium on its own soil -- the key element in Moscow's plan.
Russia's proposal to enrich uranium on Iran's behalf is designed to allay world fears about Iranian scientists diverting nuclear material into bombs and to defuse a standoff that has already seen Tehran reported to the U.N. Security Council.
Iranian nuclear negotiator Javad Vaeedi said the talks would now start in Moscow on February 20.
"We still want to reach a formula to prove that we will not divert uranium enriched on Iranian soil," he told reporters.
Russia confirmed that Iran had asked to postpone the talks, originally scheduled for Thursday, until Monday.
"We are trying to agree on whether that date is acceptable for the Russian side," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said, RIA news agency reported.
Iran has already undercut the aim of Moscow's proposal by resuming uranium enrichment in underground facilities near the town of Natanz, arguing the Islamic Republic has every right to purify the uranium it mines in its central deserts.
Iranian officials have said Russia will have to alter its terms to gain Tehran's consent for its proposal.
Diplomats in Vienna, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Tehran wanted to spin out dialogue without committing itself to anything, calculating this could make the Security Council hesitate before taking any action against it.
Western countries suspect Iran is seeking enriched uranium to build nuclear weapons and this month persuaded the IAEA's ruling board to report Iran to the council. Iran denies it wants bombs, saying it needs atomic fuel only for power stations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference in Yerevan there was still room for Iran and Russia to discuss where enrichment would take place.
However, in the past such remarks have indicated Iran's willingness to enrich uranium jointly with Russia, not that it is ready to surrender its right to produce atomic fuel at home.
CALLS FOR DIPLOMACY
Germany and China called for diplomacy to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran.
"The international community should not give up diplomatic efforts under the IAEA's framework," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said. "A solution through dialogue serves the interests of China, Iran and all parties concerned."
German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said: "A military solution is not being discussed right now. I hope that if the international community stands together we can find a solution."
Vaeedi also confirmed that Iran had revived small-scale uranium enrichment, which it had stopped for two and a half years while negotiating with European Union powers.
"The order to resume uranium enrichment has been issued and, in accordance with that, the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization has restarted the process," he told reporters.
Iran's parliament passed a law in November binding the government to resume making atomic fuel and limit cooperation with the IAEA if its case went to the Security Council.
However, Vaeedi said Iran would not be able to reach industrial-scale production of atomic fuel quickly.
"We need some time to reach that level with all centrifuges because of the 2-1/2 year suspension. However, the preliminary phases have been launched," he said.
Centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning it at supersonic speed.
Diplomats said in September that Iran could have serious technical difficulties in enriching uranium on an industrial scale, which requires getting centrifuges to work in cascades.
Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said steps were being taken to limit U.N. observation of atomic facilities, previously allowed by Tehran when it was observing the Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has not ratified the protocol.
"Since the Additional Protocol is not in force any more some of those cameras should be taken out," he told state television.
(Additional reporting by Sophie Hardach in Sestriere, Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Mark Heinrich in Vienna)
Source: REUTERS
Is the United States going to bomb Iran? (ARI)
ARI Nº 12/2005 -- Analysis
Soeren Kern ( 1/28/2005 )
Theme: The White House has signalled that it is serious about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Summary: A recent flurry of statements by senior US officials indicates that the United States has opted to take a hard-line approach towards Iran, which many analysts believe could build a nuclear bomb within the next four years. European leaders have been quick to stress the need for diplomacy over military action. In public the White House has been careful to express support for the diplomatic initiative being pursued by Britain, France and Germany, in which Tehran is being pressed to surrender its nuclear ambitions. But privately senior US officials view this exercise with the same scepticism as they did the UN process ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, recent US comments about a possible Israeli strike on Iran were intended to warn the EU to take a more vigorous stance against Tehran. In any case, talk of military action against Iran should be taken seriously. If EU diplomacy fails to end the standoff with Iran, a confrontation between Washington and Tehran appears inevitable.
Analysis
Fanning the Flames
During an interview just hours before US President George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, on 20 January US Vice President Dick Cheney signalled that the White House intends to increase the pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme. Cheney said that when ‘you look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list’. Then he said: ‘the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterward’. Cheney added: ‘We don’t want a war in the Middle East if we can avoid it’. But he left the strong impression that if diplomacy failed, military action would follow.
One day earlier, during her confirmation hearing on 19 January, US Secretary of State designate Condoleezza Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the White House doubts the European effort will succeed. ‘We are sceptical that this is going to work’, Rice said. But she also said US differences with Iran go well beyond its nuclear and missile programmes. ‘It’s really hard to find common ground with a government that thinks Israel should be extinguished’, she told senators. ‘Iran’s policies are 180 degrees to our own interest at this point’, she said. Rice also listed Iran among six ‘outposts of tyranny’, which echoes Bush’s ‘axis of evil’. This suggests that the White House in fact has no interest in reviving bilateral ties that have been frozen since the 1980 hostage crisis in Tehran.
The comments follow the publication on 17 January of a sensational article in The New Yorker magazine, which claims the US has had a covert operation inside Iran since last summer in an effort to pinpoint sites that could be hit by air-strikes or commando raids. ‘Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids’, the article claims. Although the Pentagon retorted that the article was ‘riddled with inaccuracies’, it did not deny its basic point. On 18 January Bush responded to the article by affirming his support for a diplomatic settlement on Iran’s nuclear programme, but he warned: ‘I will never take any option off the table’.
Some analysts believe the article is part of a deliberate disinformation campaign directed against Tehran. But others say US covert reconnaissance missions into Iran to determine details about its programme are inevitable and should come as no surprise. Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the intelligence community by the 9/11 Commission was that it did not take appropriate covert action against al-Qaeda. So the penetration of special forces into Iran may well be driven by the need for solid evidence about Iran’s nuclear intentions after US intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved to be unreliable.
Indeed, the US for years has been passing intelligence to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in an effort to prod it to conduct more vigorous inspections of Iranian nuclear installations. For example, US satellite images prompted a team of five IAEA inspectors on 13 January to visit a facility in Parchin –a sprawling military complex located 30 km south-east of Tehran– which the US believes is being used to simulate the testing of nuclear weapons. But Iranian officials balked, providing inspectors with only limited access; the IAEA is now seeking permission to go back for a second look. In any case, US efforts to contain Iran within the framework of the IAEA are complicated by the dysfunctional relationship Washington has with the organisation. Indeed, the Bush administration has been seeking to replace IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei –whose term is up for renewal in 2005– because of his willingness to challenge US assertions on Iraq and Iran.
Meanwhile, support for ‘regime change’ in Iran is growing in the US Congress. The proposed ‘Iran Freedom and Support Act’ calls on the Bush administration to promote alliances with opposition groups. The initiative is being closely coordinated with the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), a pressure group created by neo-conservatives that aims to set the US foreign policy agenda for Iran. The CDI has strong ties to the exiled Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted Shah of Iran. This leads some analysts to conclude that the US intends largely to fund dissident groups that advocate a restoration of the monarchy in Iran.
Israeli officials have also stepped up the rhetoric over Iran. The head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said on 24 January that Iran’s nuclear programme was nearing the ‘point of no return’. If Iran resumes enrichment of uranium, ‘the route to building a bomb is a short one’, he said. His concerns were echoed by Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who said that ‘Iran has become the focal point of all the dangers of the Middle East’. Seeking to build international support for action against Tehran, he also said that a nuclear Iran is a ‘Western’ problem, and not simply an Israeli issue. ‘This problem should be of concern to the whole world and not just Israel’, he said, adding: ‘The world must mobilize against the Iranian nuclear option’.
But there is no real international consensus on how best to deal with Iran. Although the US is trying to avoid a public split by paying lip service to EU diplomacy, the White House doubts that the EU is able or willing to promote the kinds of policies that Washington wants regarding Tehran. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer appealed on 21 January to Europe and the US to coordinate a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to Iran over its nuclear plans. ‘It’s of utmost importance that the European Union and the United States of America see eye to eye on Iran. Only this way can we prevent that nations or alliances can be played out against each other’, he warned.
Will Iran Cause the Next Transatlantic Bust-Up?
Of all the issues facing the transatlantic relationship, Iran is the most serious. But there are major disagreements between Europe and the US over how to deal with Tehran. The Europeans have championed engagement while the Clinton and Bush administrations have favoured a combination of unilateral economic sanctions and public criticism of Iran’s regime. On their own, neither approach has worked.
The core issue surrounding the current deadlock involves Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. Iran is widely believed to be using its civilian nuclear power programme as a cover to develop weapons by exploiting loopholes that allow for the enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes. The US believes Iran is seeking to enrich uranium not to the low level needed to generate power, but to weapons-grade uranium that forms the core of nuclear warheads.
The centre of diplomatic efforts is a fragile agreement that Britain, France and Germany (EU3) reached with Iran in November 2004 in which Tehran agreed temporarily to suspend activities related to uranium enrichment. The agreement derailed US attempts to have Iran reported to the UN Security Council for alleged violations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The IAEA is policing the suspension. But only days after Tehran signed the agreement, Iran’s powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani boasted: ‘Tehran is set to be a member of the nuclear club soon and will resume enrichment after a maximum of six months’.
Concerns about Iran grew after the IAEA in 2004 discovered that Tehran had been pursuing covert nuclear activities for more than two decades, in violation of its obligations under the NPT. Iran also acknowledged that it bought nuclear equipment on the black market. This was especially contentious because Iran earlier told the IAEA that it had not received any nuclear components from foreign sources. The admission came after Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, confessed that he had sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. IAEA inspectors subsequently found that Iranian nuclear components matched drawings of equipment found in Libya and supplied by the clandestine Pakistani network.
Iran ratified the NPT in 1970. Although the NPT allows signatories to enrich uranium to provide reactor fuel, the same technology can then be used to enrich uranium further to weapons-grade standard. Therefore, the IAEA insists that any enrichment programme is fully declared and safeguarded. Iran’s predicament is that it now has the stigma of having deceived the IAEA, and while Tehran is technically correct that it is entitled to an entire indigenous nuclear fuel cycle under the terms of the NPT, this development is now unacceptable to both the EU and the US.
Therefore, the EU is trying to persuade Iran to turn its present temporary suspension of its enrichment programme into a commitment to permanently mothball all such activities. But the EU was unable to secure such a promise during a second round of talks held in Geneva on 17 January, even though it offered Iran the incentive of a possible trade agreement. Indeed, Iran continued its established pattern of nuclear brinksmanship; ahead of the talks, a senior Iranian official told a press conference that if the negotiations do not go well, Iran would resume uranium enrichment in March. And in what may be a clear statement of the true Iranian position, he then added that Iran ‘would never scrap its nuclear fuel cycle work… if the European problem is the fuel cycle, then negotiations are useless.’ An exasperated German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer responded by telling the Iranian negotiators that Tehran may be miscalculating the EU’s ability to hinder the US from using military force.
The Israelis are also sceptical about the EU approach. A paper dated 16 January and titled ‘Europe and Iran’s Nuclear Future’, published by the Tel Aviv-based Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies –an institution that generally reflects official Israeli thinking–, says that Israel is dissatisfied with the EU talks because the Europeans have never unreservedly condemned Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Because of this, the EU is more susceptible to Iranian manipulation, the paper argues. Indeed, the EU has already wavered by agreeing to de-link progress on Iranian human rights from the economic incentives. Moreover, part of the EU deal hinges on the eventual integration of Iran into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a move the US flatly rejects.
Indeed, it is unlikely that the EU effort can succeed without US leadership. Brussels and Washington both recognise that the Europeans lack the clout to win durable compromises from Iran because they cannot offer Tehran the security guarantees it seeks in exchange for a permanent freeze on uranium enrichment. But even though Washington faces weak diplomatic and military options, the White House has refused to participate in the EU talks. This has prompted some critics to accuse Bush of ‘sub-contracting’ American security to the Europeans. But other analysts believe the US has followed the negotiations from the sidelines in an effort to keep its options open, possibly because it has not wanted to upset an understanding it has with Iran regarding Iraq ahead of Iraqi elections on 30 January.
Why UN Diplomacy Will Fail
Still others argue that those in Washington who favour confrontation might be eagerly awaiting a collapse of the EU-Iran talks in order to bring the issue to the UN Security Council, where the US would seek economic sanctions against Iran. Since Iran’s oil sector accounts for 50% of government revenues and 80% of its export earnings, a ban on investment in its oil industry or the purchase of Iranian oil could induce Iran to reconsider its nuclear programme, some US policymakers argue. But sanctions are unlikely because Iran’s key trading partners –China, France and Russia– have the right of veto in the UN Security Council.
China has already threatened to block attempts to impose restrictions on Tehran, and has said it wants the issue over Iran’s nuclear programmes to be resolved ‘within the auspices of the IAEA’. This is because the search for energy is becoming the dominant factor in China’s foreign policy choices. Indeed, In October 2004 Beijing signed a US$100 billion energy deal with Tehran, which guarantees China 150,000 barrels of oil a day at market prices for 25 years, and 250 million tons of liquid natural gas over 30 years. In 2004 Iran was the second-largest source of imported oil for China. This has frustrated the effectiveness of existing US economic sanctions on Iran. The Bush administration noted its displeasure on 16 January when it imposed sanctions against nine major Chinese companies that have been providing missile and military technology to Iran.
Russia is also unlikely to support UN sanctions on Iran. Moscow places a high priority on preserving the agreement it has with Tehran to finish construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Indeed, Iran is essential to Russia’s nuclear power sector. The nuclear power industry in Russia faced an uncertain future after it lost customers following the collapse of communism, and the deal with Iran provides tens of thousands of Russian companies with most of their work. In October 2003 the US persuaded Russia to delay delivery of fuel rods to Bushehr until late 2005; this has slowed down the Iranian programme, and inauguration of the US$800 million reactor was recently postponed until October 2006. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran remain in protracted negotiations over the construction of three to five additional facilities at a cost of US$3.2 billion.
Iran is also likely to test Anglo-American relations. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has paid a heavy political price for his unwavering support for Washington in the Iraq War. Blair and his Labour Party face national elections in May with the opposition Conservative Party not too far behind in the opinion polls. Any forays in Iran could therefore cost Blair dearly on the home front. Indeed, on 23 January the London Sunday Times reported that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had prepared a 200-page paper for the House of Commons laying out the case against military action in Iran. The document touted ongoing EU negotiations with Iran as being ‘in the best interests of Iran and the international community’.
Amid fears that the Bush administration may seek support for a conflict with Iran, on 24 January Straw met with White House officials in an effort to quash speculation of military action. But after his meeting with Rice, Straw acknowledged that he did not ask whether the US had plans to use military force against Iran, and the new secretary of state did not offer to tell him.
All of this means that if the US does decide to go to war against Iran, it will have to go it alone. This is ironic because the case for going to war against Iran is in fact far stronger than the case against Iraq. But why can’t the US just live with a nuclear Iran?
Why the US Cares About a Nuclear Iran
Iran is at the nexus of two of America’s main national security concerns: terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The 9/11 Commission has implied that Iran had more to do with al-Qaeda than Iraq ever did. Given the radical nature of the Iranian regime, this has raised the spectre of terrorist access to weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, the US State Department says Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, and it continues to support militant groups involved in a variety of regional conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In fact, it was the discovery of more than 50 tons of Iranian weapons heading for Palestine on the Karine-A merchant ship in the early days of the Bush administration that was the catalyst that placed Iran on the ‘axis of evil’ and clearly put it in the sights of America’s new policy of preventive military action.
Iran also has ongoing relationships with competing power centres in Afghanistan and Iraq, and could play an important spoiler role in the short- and long-term future of both countries. Indeed, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons might further embolden its hard-line conservative leadership to bully its neighbours, stiff-arm Europe and sponsor terrorism against Israel and US interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. Indeed, a nuclear Iran would be in a unique position to disrupt access through the strategically vital Persian Gulf. Some 40% of the world’s traded oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
An Iranian bomb is also likely to spur a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. If Iran’s neighbours are uncertain about how strongly the US will deter the Iranian nuclear threat, then regional states will have to consider whether they need to proliferate themselves. There are signs that Saudi Arabia and Turkey –both of which are long-time regional rivals with Iran– are already debating this question.
Because Iran occupies such a central position in the Middle East, its internal and international conduct has wide-ranging repercussions for the region as a whole and for US interests within it. Therefore, the US would view an anti-American, nuclear-armed Iran as a major threat to regional and international security.
As a result, there is a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington that restraining Iran will be the top national security priority of the second Bush term. But there is a hawk/dove split in US foreign policy circles over how best to deal with Tehran. There are some hard-line voices –especially among neo-conservatives– who argue that the regime cannot be rehabilitated and that conditions are ripe for an imminent revolution to bring about full democratic change in Iran. Although many analysts view this as overly optimistic, these forecasts have helped shape current US policy towards Tehran, conditioning the Bush administration to reach out to putative opposition leaders and making US policymakers reluctant to engage with the current regime in order to avoid perpetuating its hold on power.
The realist counter-argument, both inside and outside the White House, is that the Iranian regime is too deeply entrenched to be changed by American interference; it controls all the instruments of power and the opposition is insufficiently united to bring about any coherent challenge to the existing system. Thus, if Washington is going to have a relationship with Tehran, it must deal with the current regime.
Indeed, a growing number of American foreign policy experts advocate limited dialogue with Iran. A July 2004 study by the Council on Foreign Relations titled ‘Iran: Time for a New Approach’ argues that the regime in Tehran is basically stable and that direct military intervention by the US in pursuit of regime change is not plausible –Iran is three times the size of Iraq and likely to be even more hostile to foreign occupation–. Moreover, the US military is already stretched to its limits by commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The study says Washington instead should expand efforts to win cooperation in areas of mutual concern because the current lack of sustained engagement with Iran harms US interests. It concludes that because of Iran’s importance, economically and geo-strategically, the US government should revise its strategic approach to Iran by seeking to engage Tehran in dialogue as a prelude to diplomatic normalisation.
As a result of these competing views, and the uncertainty surrounding Iran’s nuclear timeline, the Bush administration is coming under intense pressure to commit itself unambiguously either to a policy of regime-change or to one of limited engagement, and direct its actions accordingly. But another option is also being debated.
Why a Military Strike is Conceivable
Speculation is rife that Israel and/or the US intend to strike at the nuclear plant in Bushehr and other facilities around Iran before fuel rods are delivered from Russia by late 2005. Bush has said that ‘we will not tolerate Iranian development of nuclear weaponry’. The head of Mossad recently said that ‘Iranian nuclear weapons pose, for the first time, an existential threat to Israel’. Indeed, a preventive military strike –of the kind Israel carried out on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981– cannot be ruled out.
But even (somewhat) chastened neo-conservatives admit that Iran is quantitatively and qualitatively different from Iraq. The December issue of the Atlantic Monthly included a sobering report titled ‘Will Iran Be Next?’. For that article, the author assembled a group of former US security officials to conduct a fascinating ‘war game’ about Iran to examine America’s military options and recommend the most suitable approach. The results can be summed up in two sentences: ‘Mr President, you have no military solution to the issues of Iran. You have to make diplomacy work.’
Israel’s options to counter the nuclear threat from Iran are also limited. If Israel were to decide to act alone, it would face a much greater challenge than it did with Osirak because the distances are much greater. Moreover, the targets are very well protected –some of them in deep underground installations–. Furthermore, it is not likely that Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Turkey would allow Israel to pass through their airspace en route to Iran. If Israel were to use the Jordan route to Iran, the US would have to allow Israeli overflight of Iraqi airspace, which would be seen as equal American complicity in the attack.
And a military raid would stand an extremely low chance of success in deterring the Iranian nuclear programme. Israel’s attack on Osirak actually did little to hinder Iraq’s nuclear aspirations. Although it temporarily set back Iraq’s capabilities, it served rather to increase Saddam’s desire for a nuclear arsenal. A preventive strike on Iranian facilities might enhance Iran’s nuclear prospects over the long term by providing Tehran with the justification to pursue a full-blown nuclear deterrent programme. Moreover, unlike Iraq in 1981, Iran no longer depends on foreign imports for nuclear technology and already has the raw materials, as well as most of the designs and techniques, required to pursue a nuclear weapons programme. Given the sophisticated nature of Iranian capabilities, even if its main facilities were to be destroyed, Iran has the know-how to pursue a more vigorous nuclear weapons programme over the long term.
A preventive military strike would also elicit fierce retaliation from Tehran. Iran has already threatened to destroy Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack its nuclear facilities. A likely scenario also includes an Iranian missile counterattack on US bases in the Persian Gulf, followed by a serious effort to destabilise Iraq. Iran could also opt to destabilise Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and induce Lebanese Hezbollah to launch sustained rocket attacks on northern Israel.
Therefore, the strategic usefulness of a unilateral preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably be short lived and could have various adverse effects on US interests in the Middle East. But somehow the US must deal with Iran. Indeed, a preventive military strike is not an unthinkable option, especially if the White House determines that an Iranian nuclear bomb would pose such a grave threat to US interests that merely postponing that process was a worthy goal, despite the attendant costs.
If the US acquires actionable intelligence on Iranian facilities, and if European diplomacy fails to obtain real guarantees from Tehran, the Bush administration may well conclude that it will soon have to do to Iran what the Israelis did to Iraq. A US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities –using cruise missiles and guided munitions from stealth bombers– would not be announced in advance. Instead, a television broadcast the following morning would acknowledge that the job had been done. In public European leaders would express collective outrage, but in private many would be relieved to be rid of the threat.
Conclusion: Iran constitutes the most pressing challenge facing the Bush administration. If European diplomacy fails to restrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the US may conclude that a preventive military strike on Iranian facilities is the only remaining option.
Soeren Kern
Senior Analyst, United States and Transatlantic Dialogue, Elcano Royal Institute.
Soeren Kern ( 1/28/2005 )
Theme: The White House has signalled that it is serious about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Summary: A recent flurry of statements by senior US officials indicates that the United States has opted to take a hard-line approach towards Iran, which many analysts believe could build a nuclear bomb within the next four years. European leaders have been quick to stress the need for diplomacy over military action. In public the White House has been careful to express support for the diplomatic initiative being pursued by Britain, France and Germany, in which Tehran is being pressed to surrender its nuclear ambitions. But privately senior US officials view this exercise with the same scepticism as they did the UN process ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, recent US comments about a possible Israeli strike on Iran were intended to warn the EU to take a more vigorous stance against Tehran. In any case, talk of military action against Iran should be taken seriously. If EU diplomacy fails to end the standoff with Iran, a confrontation between Washington and Tehran appears inevitable.
Analysis
Fanning the Flames
During an interview just hours before US President George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, on 20 January US Vice President Dick Cheney signalled that the White House intends to increase the pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme. Cheney said that when ‘you look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list’. Then he said: ‘the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterward’. Cheney added: ‘We don’t want a war in the Middle East if we can avoid it’. But he left the strong impression that if diplomacy failed, military action would follow.
One day earlier, during her confirmation hearing on 19 January, US Secretary of State designate Condoleezza Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the White House doubts the European effort will succeed. ‘We are sceptical that this is going to work’, Rice said. But she also said US differences with Iran go well beyond its nuclear and missile programmes. ‘It’s really hard to find common ground with a government that thinks Israel should be extinguished’, she told senators. ‘Iran’s policies are 180 degrees to our own interest at this point’, she said. Rice also listed Iran among six ‘outposts of tyranny’, which echoes Bush’s ‘axis of evil’. This suggests that the White House in fact has no interest in reviving bilateral ties that have been frozen since the 1980 hostage crisis in Tehran.
The comments follow the publication on 17 January of a sensational article in The New Yorker magazine, which claims the US has had a covert operation inside Iran since last summer in an effort to pinpoint sites that could be hit by air-strikes or commando raids. ‘Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids’, the article claims. Although the Pentagon retorted that the article was ‘riddled with inaccuracies’, it did not deny its basic point. On 18 January Bush responded to the article by affirming his support for a diplomatic settlement on Iran’s nuclear programme, but he warned: ‘I will never take any option off the table’.
Some analysts believe the article is part of a deliberate disinformation campaign directed against Tehran. But others say US covert reconnaissance missions into Iran to determine details about its programme are inevitable and should come as no surprise. Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the intelligence community by the 9/11 Commission was that it did not take appropriate covert action against al-Qaeda. So the penetration of special forces into Iran may well be driven by the need for solid evidence about Iran’s nuclear intentions after US intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved to be unreliable.
Indeed, the US for years has been passing intelligence to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in an effort to prod it to conduct more vigorous inspections of Iranian nuclear installations. For example, US satellite images prompted a team of five IAEA inspectors on 13 January to visit a facility in Parchin –a sprawling military complex located 30 km south-east of Tehran– which the US believes is being used to simulate the testing of nuclear weapons. But Iranian officials balked, providing inspectors with only limited access; the IAEA is now seeking permission to go back for a second look. In any case, US efforts to contain Iran within the framework of the IAEA are complicated by the dysfunctional relationship Washington has with the organisation. Indeed, the Bush administration has been seeking to replace IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei –whose term is up for renewal in 2005– because of his willingness to challenge US assertions on Iraq and Iran.
Meanwhile, support for ‘regime change’ in Iran is growing in the US Congress. The proposed ‘Iran Freedom and Support Act’ calls on the Bush administration to promote alliances with opposition groups. The initiative is being closely coordinated with the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), a pressure group created by neo-conservatives that aims to set the US foreign policy agenda for Iran. The CDI has strong ties to the exiled Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted Shah of Iran. This leads some analysts to conclude that the US intends largely to fund dissident groups that advocate a restoration of the monarchy in Iran.
Israeli officials have also stepped up the rhetoric over Iran. The head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said on 24 January that Iran’s nuclear programme was nearing the ‘point of no return’. If Iran resumes enrichment of uranium, ‘the route to building a bomb is a short one’, he said. His concerns were echoed by Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who said that ‘Iran has become the focal point of all the dangers of the Middle East’. Seeking to build international support for action against Tehran, he also said that a nuclear Iran is a ‘Western’ problem, and not simply an Israeli issue. ‘This problem should be of concern to the whole world and not just Israel’, he said, adding: ‘The world must mobilize against the Iranian nuclear option’.
But there is no real international consensus on how best to deal with Iran. Although the US is trying to avoid a public split by paying lip service to EU diplomacy, the White House doubts that the EU is able or willing to promote the kinds of policies that Washington wants regarding Tehran. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer appealed on 21 January to Europe and the US to coordinate a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to Iran over its nuclear plans. ‘It’s of utmost importance that the European Union and the United States of America see eye to eye on Iran. Only this way can we prevent that nations or alliances can be played out against each other’, he warned.
Will Iran Cause the Next Transatlantic Bust-Up?
Of all the issues facing the transatlantic relationship, Iran is the most serious. But there are major disagreements between Europe and the US over how to deal with Tehran. The Europeans have championed engagement while the Clinton and Bush administrations have favoured a combination of unilateral economic sanctions and public criticism of Iran’s regime. On their own, neither approach has worked.
The core issue surrounding the current deadlock involves Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. Iran is widely believed to be using its civilian nuclear power programme as a cover to develop weapons by exploiting loopholes that allow for the enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes. The US believes Iran is seeking to enrich uranium not to the low level needed to generate power, but to weapons-grade uranium that forms the core of nuclear warheads.
The centre of diplomatic efforts is a fragile agreement that Britain, France and Germany (EU3) reached with Iran in November 2004 in which Tehran agreed temporarily to suspend activities related to uranium enrichment. The agreement derailed US attempts to have Iran reported to the UN Security Council for alleged violations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The IAEA is policing the suspension. But only days after Tehran signed the agreement, Iran’s powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani boasted: ‘Tehran is set to be a member of the nuclear club soon and will resume enrichment after a maximum of six months’.
Concerns about Iran grew after the IAEA in 2004 discovered that Tehran had been pursuing covert nuclear activities for more than two decades, in violation of its obligations under the NPT. Iran also acknowledged that it bought nuclear equipment on the black market. This was especially contentious because Iran earlier told the IAEA that it had not received any nuclear components from foreign sources. The admission came after Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, confessed that he had sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. IAEA inspectors subsequently found that Iranian nuclear components matched drawings of equipment found in Libya and supplied by the clandestine Pakistani network.
Iran ratified the NPT in 1970. Although the NPT allows signatories to enrich uranium to provide reactor fuel, the same technology can then be used to enrich uranium further to weapons-grade standard. Therefore, the IAEA insists that any enrichment programme is fully declared and safeguarded. Iran’s predicament is that it now has the stigma of having deceived the IAEA, and while Tehran is technically correct that it is entitled to an entire indigenous nuclear fuel cycle under the terms of the NPT, this development is now unacceptable to both the EU and the US.
Therefore, the EU is trying to persuade Iran to turn its present temporary suspension of its enrichment programme into a commitment to permanently mothball all such activities. But the EU was unable to secure such a promise during a second round of talks held in Geneva on 17 January, even though it offered Iran the incentive of a possible trade agreement. Indeed, Iran continued its established pattern of nuclear brinksmanship; ahead of the talks, a senior Iranian official told a press conference that if the negotiations do not go well, Iran would resume uranium enrichment in March. And in what may be a clear statement of the true Iranian position, he then added that Iran ‘would never scrap its nuclear fuel cycle work… if the European problem is the fuel cycle, then negotiations are useless.’ An exasperated German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer responded by telling the Iranian negotiators that Tehran may be miscalculating the EU’s ability to hinder the US from using military force.
The Israelis are also sceptical about the EU approach. A paper dated 16 January and titled ‘Europe and Iran’s Nuclear Future’, published by the Tel Aviv-based Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies –an institution that generally reflects official Israeli thinking–, says that Israel is dissatisfied with the EU talks because the Europeans have never unreservedly condemned Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Because of this, the EU is more susceptible to Iranian manipulation, the paper argues. Indeed, the EU has already wavered by agreeing to de-link progress on Iranian human rights from the economic incentives. Moreover, part of the EU deal hinges on the eventual integration of Iran into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a move the US flatly rejects.
Indeed, it is unlikely that the EU effort can succeed without US leadership. Brussels and Washington both recognise that the Europeans lack the clout to win durable compromises from Iran because they cannot offer Tehran the security guarantees it seeks in exchange for a permanent freeze on uranium enrichment. But even though Washington faces weak diplomatic and military options, the White House has refused to participate in the EU talks. This has prompted some critics to accuse Bush of ‘sub-contracting’ American security to the Europeans. But other analysts believe the US has followed the negotiations from the sidelines in an effort to keep its options open, possibly because it has not wanted to upset an understanding it has with Iran regarding Iraq ahead of Iraqi elections on 30 January.
Why UN Diplomacy Will Fail
Still others argue that those in Washington who favour confrontation might be eagerly awaiting a collapse of the EU-Iran talks in order to bring the issue to the UN Security Council, where the US would seek economic sanctions against Iran. Since Iran’s oil sector accounts for 50% of government revenues and 80% of its export earnings, a ban on investment in its oil industry or the purchase of Iranian oil could induce Iran to reconsider its nuclear programme, some US policymakers argue. But sanctions are unlikely because Iran’s key trading partners –China, France and Russia– have the right of veto in the UN Security Council.
China has already threatened to block attempts to impose restrictions on Tehran, and has said it wants the issue over Iran’s nuclear programmes to be resolved ‘within the auspices of the IAEA’. This is because the search for energy is becoming the dominant factor in China’s foreign policy choices. Indeed, In October 2004 Beijing signed a US$100 billion energy deal with Tehran, which guarantees China 150,000 barrels of oil a day at market prices for 25 years, and 250 million tons of liquid natural gas over 30 years. In 2004 Iran was the second-largest source of imported oil for China. This has frustrated the effectiveness of existing US economic sanctions on Iran. The Bush administration noted its displeasure on 16 January when it imposed sanctions against nine major Chinese companies that have been providing missile and military technology to Iran.
Russia is also unlikely to support UN sanctions on Iran. Moscow places a high priority on preserving the agreement it has with Tehran to finish construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Indeed, Iran is essential to Russia’s nuclear power sector. The nuclear power industry in Russia faced an uncertain future after it lost customers following the collapse of communism, and the deal with Iran provides tens of thousands of Russian companies with most of their work. In October 2003 the US persuaded Russia to delay delivery of fuel rods to Bushehr until late 2005; this has slowed down the Iranian programme, and inauguration of the US$800 million reactor was recently postponed until October 2006. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran remain in protracted negotiations over the construction of three to five additional facilities at a cost of US$3.2 billion.
Iran is also likely to test Anglo-American relations. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has paid a heavy political price for his unwavering support for Washington in the Iraq War. Blair and his Labour Party face national elections in May with the opposition Conservative Party not too far behind in the opinion polls. Any forays in Iran could therefore cost Blair dearly on the home front. Indeed, on 23 January the London Sunday Times reported that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had prepared a 200-page paper for the House of Commons laying out the case against military action in Iran. The document touted ongoing EU negotiations with Iran as being ‘in the best interests of Iran and the international community’.
Amid fears that the Bush administration may seek support for a conflict with Iran, on 24 January Straw met with White House officials in an effort to quash speculation of military action. But after his meeting with Rice, Straw acknowledged that he did not ask whether the US had plans to use military force against Iran, and the new secretary of state did not offer to tell him.
All of this means that if the US does decide to go to war against Iran, it will have to go it alone. This is ironic because the case for going to war against Iran is in fact far stronger than the case against Iraq. But why can’t the US just live with a nuclear Iran?
Why the US Cares About a Nuclear Iran
Iran is at the nexus of two of America’s main national security concerns: terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The 9/11 Commission has implied that Iran had more to do with al-Qaeda than Iraq ever did. Given the radical nature of the Iranian regime, this has raised the spectre of terrorist access to weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, the US State Department says Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, and it continues to support militant groups involved in a variety of regional conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In fact, it was the discovery of more than 50 tons of Iranian weapons heading for Palestine on the Karine-A merchant ship in the early days of the Bush administration that was the catalyst that placed Iran on the ‘axis of evil’ and clearly put it in the sights of America’s new policy of preventive military action.
Iran also has ongoing relationships with competing power centres in Afghanistan and Iraq, and could play an important spoiler role in the short- and long-term future of both countries. Indeed, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons might further embolden its hard-line conservative leadership to bully its neighbours, stiff-arm Europe and sponsor terrorism against Israel and US interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. Indeed, a nuclear Iran would be in a unique position to disrupt access through the strategically vital Persian Gulf. Some 40% of the world’s traded oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
An Iranian bomb is also likely to spur a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. If Iran’s neighbours are uncertain about how strongly the US will deter the Iranian nuclear threat, then regional states will have to consider whether they need to proliferate themselves. There are signs that Saudi Arabia and Turkey –both of which are long-time regional rivals with Iran– are already debating this question.
Because Iran occupies such a central position in the Middle East, its internal and international conduct has wide-ranging repercussions for the region as a whole and for US interests within it. Therefore, the US would view an anti-American, nuclear-armed Iran as a major threat to regional and international security.
As a result, there is a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington that restraining Iran will be the top national security priority of the second Bush term. But there is a hawk/dove split in US foreign policy circles over how best to deal with Tehran. There are some hard-line voices –especially among neo-conservatives– who argue that the regime cannot be rehabilitated and that conditions are ripe for an imminent revolution to bring about full democratic change in Iran. Although many analysts view this as overly optimistic, these forecasts have helped shape current US policy towards Tehran, conditioning the Bush administration to reach out to putative opposition leaders and making US policymakers reluctant to engage with the current regime in order to avoid perpetuating its hold on power.
The realist counter-argument, both inside and outside the White House, is that the Iranian regime is too deeply entrenched to be changed by American interference; it controls all the instruments of power and the opposition is insufficiently united to bring about any coherent challenge to the existing system. Thus, if Washington is going to have a relationship with Tehran, it must deal with the current regime.
Indeed, a growing number of American foreign policy experts advocate limited dialogue with Iran. A July 2004 study by the Council on Foreign Relations titled ‘Iran: Time for a New Approach’ argues that the regime in Tehran is basically stable and that direct military intervention by the US in pursuit of regime change is not plausible –Iran is three times the size of Iraq and likely to be even more hostile to foreign occupation–. Moreover, the US military is already stretched to its limits by commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The study says Washington instead should expand efforts to win cooperation in areas of mutual concern because the current lack of sustained engagement with Iran harms US interests. It concludes that because of Iran’s importance, economically and geo-strategically, the US government should revise its strategic approach to Iran by seeking to engage Tehran in dialogue as a prelude to diplomatic normalisation.
As a result of these competing views, and the uncertainty surrounding Iran’s nuclear timeline, the Bush administration is coming under intense pressure to commit itself unambiguously either to a policy of regime-change or to one of limited engagement, and direct its actions accordingly. But another option is also being debated.
Why a Military Strike is Conceivable
Speculation is rife that Israel and/or the US intend to strike at the nuclear plant in Bushehr and other facilities around Iran before fuel rods are delivered from Russia by late 2005. Bush has said that ‘we will not tolerate Iranian development of nuclear weaponry’. The head of Mossad recently said that ‘Iranian nuclear weapons pose, for the first time, an existential threat to Israel’. Indeed, a preventive military strike –of the kind Israel carried out on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981– cannot be ruled out.
But even (somewhat) chastened neo-conservatives admit that Iran is quantitatively and qualitatively different from Iraq. The December issue of the Atlantic Monthly included a sobering report titled ‘Will Iran Be Next?’. For that article, the author assembled a group of former US security officials to conduct a fascinating ‘war game’ about Iran to examine America’s military options and recommend the most suitable approach. The results can be summed up in two sentences: ‘Mr President, you have no military solution to the issues of Iran. You have to make diplomacy work.’
Israel’s options to counter the nuclear threat from Iran are also limited. If Israel were to decide to act alone, it would face a much greater challenge than it did with Osirak because the distances are much greater. Moreover, the targets are very well protected –some of them in deep underground installations–. Furthermore, it is not likely that Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Turkey would allow Israel to pass through their airspace en route to Iran. If Israel were to use the Jordan route to Iran, the US would have to allow Israeli overflight of Iraqi airspace, which would be seen as equal American complicity in the attack.
And a military raid would stand an extremely low chance of success in deterring the Iranian nuclear programme. Israel’s attack on Osirak actually did little to hinder Iraq’s nuclear aspirations. Although it temporarily set back Iraq’s capabilities, it served rather to increase Saddam’s desire for a nuclear arsenal. A preventive strike on Iranian facilities might enhance Iran’s nuclear prospects over the long term by providing Tehran with the justification to pursue a full-blown nuclear deterrent programme. Moreover, unlike Iraq in 1981, Iran no longer depends on foreign imports for nuclear technology and already has the raw materials, as well as most of the designs and techniques, required to pursue a nuclear weapons programme. Given the sophisticated nature of Iranian capabilities, even if its main facilities were to be destroyed, Iran has the know-how to pursue a more vigorous nuclear weapons programme over the long term.
A preventive military strike would also elicit fierce retaliation from Tehran. Iran has already threatened to destroy Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack its nuclear facilities. A likely scenario also includes an Iranian missile counterattack on US bases in the Persian Gulf, followed by a serious effort to destabilise Iraq. Iran could also opt to destabilise Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and induce Lebanese Hezbollah to launch sustained rocket attacks on northern Israel.
Therefore, the strategic usefulness of a unilateral preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably be short lived and could have various adverse effects on US interests in the Middle East. But somehow the US must deal with Iran. Indeed, a preventive military strike is not an unthinkable option, especially if the White House determines that an Iranian nuclear bomb would pose such a grave threat to US interests that merely postponing that process was a worthy goal, despite the attendant costs.
If the US acquires actionable intelligence on Iranian facilities, and if European diplomacy fails to obtain real guarantees from Tehran, the Bush administration may well conclude that it will soon have to do to Iran what the Israelis did to Iraq. A US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities –using cruise missiles and guided munitions from stealth bombers– would not be announced in advance. Instead, a television broadcast the following morning would acknowledge that the job had been done. In public European leaders would express collective outrage, but in private many would be relieved to be rid of the threat.
Conclusion: Iran constitutes the most pressing challenge facing the Bush administration. If European diplomacy fails to restrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the US may conclude that a preventive military strike on Iranian facilities is the only remaining option.
Soeren Kern
Senior Analyst, United States and Transatlantic Dialogue, Elcano Royal Institute.
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