‘USEFUL IDIOTS’: WHY WOULD ANY AMERICAN HELP FIDEL CASTRO BRING HIS CUBAN CHERNOBYLS ON-LINE?

(Washington, D.C.): An article in today’s Washington
Times offers the latest evidence that the Clinton
Administration is bent on normalizing relations with
Fidel Castro’s Cuba. While it notes the official
party line — “a White House spokesman said there
has been ‘no weakening’ of the President’s commitment to
the economic embargo” against Cuba — the report
illustrates just how weak that commitment actually is:

“…Mr. Kavulich [president of the U.S.-Cuba
Trade and Economic Council, one of a number of such
councils established to open and/or foster trade with
Communist nations], who arranged business meetings
for Mr. Castro when the Cuban leader visited New York
last year, confirmed widespread reports that the
State Department is advising [American] companies to
make their Cuban contacts now in anticipation of the
embargo being eased or lifted. ‘We deal with
State and Treasury every day,’ Mr. Kavulich said.
‘We’ve heard the exact same statement.'”
(Emphasis added.)

A Classic Bait-and-Switch

Even as the Clinton Administration sends such signals
to corporations more interested in exploiting a new,
cheap work force and selling products to an untapped
market than in freedom for Cuba, it is going to
extraordinary lengths to elicit support from
Cuban-American voters determined to secure a Cuba
Libre. Notably, the Administration recently
undertook what appeared to be a politically motivated
purge of virtually its entire Cuba policy-making team, a
group whose unabashed determination to restore normal
relations with Castro was a serious irritant to the
influential Cuban-American community. Among the departed
(or departing) are: Morton Halperin, Senior
Director for Democracy, National Security Council; Edward
Casey, Deputy Assistant of State for Inter-American
Affairs; Richard Feinberg, Senior Director for
Inter-American Affairs, National Security Council; Arturo
Valenzuela, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
Inter-American Affairs; and Michael Skol,
Principal Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs.

The Administration’s ideological agenda is such,
however, that it will almost certainly act to ease or end
the embargo immediately after the November election — whether
President Clinton is reelected or not. While such
a step will be dressed up in the sort of trade promotion uber
alles policy that has been used to justify, for
example, normalization of relations with Vietnam and
ignoring malevolent Chinese behavior, its practical
effect will be to achieve a longstanding goal of the
American Left: providing life-support for Fidel Castro’s
failed, despotic regime.

Enter the Cuban Chernobyl

There is though one major problem. Castro appears
determined to bring on-line two Soviet-designed VVER-440
nuclear reactors that are approaching completion near
Cienfuegos, Cuba. As knowledgeable defectors href=”96-D13.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾, the General
Accounting Office, NBC News and the Center for Security
Policy ⁽²⁾
(among others) have pointed out, there is ample reason
to believe that such a step will give rise to a nuclear
accident, possibly involving the dissemination of deadly
levels of radiation over much of the United States.

The following are among the defects that have been
identified in the Juragua nuclear reactors:

• As many as fifteen percent of the 5,000 welds
  joining pipes used in the reactors’ auxiliary
  plumbing system, containment dome and spent
  fuel-cooling system are known to be flawed.
  According to Vladimir Cervera, the senior
  engineer responsible for overseeing quality
  control at the Juragua reactor, X-rays showed
  welded pipe joints weakened by air pockets, bad
  soldering and heat damage. Bear in mind that, if
  a single weld in a U.S. reactor were
  suspected of being defective, the Nuclear
  Regulatory Commission would never allow it to go
  on-line and, if discovered after that step had
  occurred, would immediately suspend nuclear
  operations.
• As most of the Juragua complex’s welds are now
  encased in concrete, it is impossible to identify
  which are defective examining an x-ray of each
  one. Unfortunately, the Cuban intelligence
  services are reported to have destroyed such
  x-ray imagery and other documentation concerning
  safety violations. Corrective action will, as a
  result, be near impossible; at a minimum, it will
  require massive deconstruction and costly
  repairs.
• Sixty-percent of the materials supplied by the
  former Soviet Union for use in these reactors is
  defective. Soviet advisors reportedly told
  Cuban officials they could not guarantee that
  valves installed in the first reactor’s emergency
  cooling system would function under certain
  conditions.
• Worse yet, much of the reactor’s equipment —
  including the reactor vessel, six steam
  generators, five primary coolant pumps, twelve
  isolation valves and other sensitive gear — has
  been left exposed to the elements and sea air for
  as long as eighteen months. In tropical
  areas, such machinery must be stored in climate
  controlled facilities to avoid serious corrosion
  and other damage which can cause a breach in the
  structural integrity of nuclear reactors. Such
  corrosion has already taken place.
• In a number of cases, equipment designed for
  one specific function has been used for other
  purposes when the appropriate components were
  unavailable. This sort of jury- rigging
  increases the chances of systemic failures.
• Construction supporting primary reactor
  components contains numerous structural defects.
• The first reactor’s dome would not be able to
  contain overpressures associated with meltdown
  conditions. The upper portion of the
  containment dome has been designed to withstand
  pressures of seven pounds-per-square-inch —
  versus some 50 pounds-per-square-inch required of
  U.S. reactors. In addition, the reactor
  containment structure contains defective welds in
  its seals.
• Cuba’s human and technological infrastructure
  is vastly inferior to that of the former Soviet
  Union. And as the Chernobyl accident
  demonstrated at incalculable cost, even the old
  Soviet infrastructure proved inadequate safely to
  design, construct and operate nuclear plants.
• Finally, there is reason to believe that the
  Cienfuegos area is seismically active — a
  reckless place to put even well-designed and
  -constructed nuclear reactors.

‘Useful Idiots’ Tour a ‘Potemkin Village‘

Understandably, few Americans would support
improvement of relations with a regime bent on creating a
Chernobyl 180 miles off the U.S. coast. After all, as
Roger W. Robinson, Jr. — former Chief Economist at the
National Security Council and a long-time member of the
Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors — told
the House International Relations Committee Subcommittee
on the Western Hemisphere on 1 August 1995:

“A Cuban nuclear accident — either of a
technical nature or the result of sabotage — could
have a similar effect to the detonation of a
nuclear device near the United States, causing a
plume of radioactive fallout that, depending on the
season and prevailing winds, could either stretch
across the lower tier of the country to Texas or race
up the eastern seaboard to Washington D.C. and
possibly beyond within the first four days.

The Cuban government has, therefore, been anxious to
allay concerns about its irretrievably flawed nuclear
reactor program. It has sought to discredit the expert
testimony of defectors. It has opened negotiations with
various European and Latin American companies and
Russia’s notorious Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom)
aimed at giving the reactors a patina of safety by
importing Western technology and know-how. Unfortunately
for Fidel, the defectors are too credible to be
cavalierly dismissed, even if other, independent U.S.
experts were not concurring in their assessments. What is
more, the structural nature of the problems they have
identified cannot be adequately offset by improved safety
controls and management techniques.

Faced with these impediments, Castro appears to have
taken pages from the Kremlin’s favorite playbook: Offer a
brief, and inevitably superficial, tour of the site
(reminiscent of Catherine the Great’s misleading
experience of a “Potemkin village”) to a group
of sympathetic Americans with no relevant technical
expertise (what the Soviet Communists used to call
“useful idiots”). Since the participants
would be unable to evaluate for themselves what they see,
and since in any event they will be unable to see
the most serious structural problems, their trip report
could be expected to confuse — if not diffuse — U.S.
popular anxieties about the Juragua facility.

Accordingly, the Castro regime has just hosted a
delegation organized by Wayne Smith (a former U.S.
diplomat who has become a full-time promoter of
normalized relations with Cuba) and comprised primarily
of retired military officers associated with the
left-wing Center for Defense Information (CDI). Also in
the company was Jack Mendelsohn, an official of the Arms
Control Association, a fervent disarmament advocacy
group. None of these individuals appear to have any
training that would enable them to evaluate the risks
associated with bringing the Cuban reactors near
Cienfuegos on-line.

One of the delegation’s leaders, the CDI’s Deputy
Director, Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, USN (Ret.),
obligingly announced in Cuba at the end of the tour:
“The cry of another Chernobyl is a red herring by
people who don’t want the plant completed.” Reuters
reported:

“The visiting group, while stressing that
safety fears were premature pending completion of
Juragua near the central port of Cienfuegos, said the
United States should get more closely involved in
finding out about Cuba’s plans. ‘If the United States
has problems [with the plant] it ought to get
involved in seeing what’s happening,’ said Jack
Mendelsohn.”

Such sentiments are likely to be a prominent feature
of a Washington news conference the delegation has
scheduled for Monday, 12 February.

But as Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) — a
Cuban-American who serves on the House International
Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere Subcommittee —
observed yesterday:

“I cannot accept the statements by retired
military personnel who are visiting Cuba that cannot
be reconciled with the expert testimony and other
information we have received before our Subcommittee.
We have heard from those who have worked on the
Juragua project as well as from the GAO whose study
established that there are clear risks of an accident
with the reactors near Cienfuegos due to defective
welding, lack of controls and other nuclear
regulatory regimes.

“It is hard to see how individuals whose
own background lacks practical or scientific
knowledge in the field can be reassured by Cuban
officials. In my mind, such reassurances are
clearly not a sufficient basis to go forward with
turning on a defective plant, given the high risk
stakes for our Nation.”

The Bottom Line

The American people are entitled to know the truth
about the Clinton Administration’s agenda for normalizing
relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. They are also
entitled to the truth about the dangers posed by
Castro’s nuclear program. The latest delegation may be
designed to advance the true Clinton agenda aimed at
easing and/or ending the trade embargo against Cuba. It
will do so by obscuring, rather than illuminating, the
facts concerning the potential for a genuine Cuban
Chernobyl-equivalent.

The Center for Security Policy urges Rep. Menendez —
and such other leading legislators as Reps. Benjamin
Gilman (R-NY), Dan Burton (R-IN), Lincoln Diaz-Balart and
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republicans of Florida) and Senators
Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Connie Mack (R-FL) — urgently to
convene further hearings on the Cienfuegos program. Their
purpose should be to ensure that American policy toward
Cuba is based upon the real and incipient threat posed by
the Castro regime, and not on disinformation or
wishful thinking.

Clear markers should also be laid down now by
the Congress that any foreign companies or government
agencies (e.g., Russia’s MinAtom) which decides to
participate in supplying components or financing for the
completion of the Juragua reactors — even if such
support is advertized as being for
“safety-enhancement purposes” — will face
swift import control sanctions, forcing such entities
to choose between doing business with Castro and with the
vast American marketplace. In this manner, the United
States can probably stop the Cuban Chernobyl-equivalent
in its tracks and avoid the serious rupture in
U.S. relations with Germany, France, Britain, Italy,
Brazil and Russia should these countries (or their
nationals) be seen as bearing some responsibility for
making that sort of disaster possible.

(1) One of these defectors is Dr.
José Oro, former Minister of Industries and Director of
the Geophysics Agency for the Cuban government during
construction of the Juragua reactor. He recently offered
the following summary of the problems with this nuclear
complex:

“The most remarkable defects of the Juragua
nuclear plant involve: 1) the poor quality of the
welding of the pipes in the cooling system, 2)
inconsistent concrete standards due to the layering
of Soviet-supplied construction materials and Cuban
supplies during different phases of the project and
3) the absence of a depository for low, medium and
high level waste materials (as required by the IAEA
in Vienna as a necessary precondition for licensing
fuel purchases and operation of the plant).”

Another knowledgeable defector is engineer Vladimir
Cervera, who when asked if there was a danger of a
nuclear catastrophe at the plant answered, “Yes, I’m
sure of that….I saw by myself [the] defect inside the
welding joint[s].”

(2) For example, see the Center’s Decision
Briefs entitled Center’s Robinson Urges
Congress to Thwart the Coming Cuban Chernobyl Nuclear
Crisis (No. 95-P 51,
2 August 1995), Cuban Chernobyl: Congress Must Send
a Message to Moscow, Allies — Not in Our Backyard!
(No. 95-D 40, 26 June
1995), Castro’s Potemkin Nuclear Shutdown:
Chernobyl at Cienfuegos Still in Prospect ( href=”92-D_108″>No. 92-D 108, 10
September 1992), and A Ticking Anniversary Present:
Will Russia Give us a Chernobyl Ninety Miles Off the U.S.
Shore? (No. 92-D 41,
8 May 1992).