YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL PRESIDENT

has, first of all, maneuvered himself into a spot where Saddam, if he pulls out of Kuwait, remains in charge of his one-million man army, including armor and missiles, an advanced state of nuclear weapons development, and a running production of chemical weapons. On the way to this enviable position, Deng's buddy Bush went out of his way to Geneva to meet Syria's Assad, the same type of butcher as Saddam, who gave directions to kill 241 US Marines in Beirut in 1983, gave protection to the murderers of the 271 passengers on the PanAm jetliner at Lockerbie in 1988, just recently had his men mas-sacre hundreds of bound Christian prisoners of war after surrender in Beirut, and is responsible for a long list of other savage atrocities.

The Intl. Atomic Energy Agency's inspection finding no evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq, incidentally, means nothing. Their inspectors may inspect only the fuel inventory of power plants and research reactors after serving prior notice, and even so, in 1981 they gave Iraq a clean bill of health over the Osirac re-search reactor which, weeks away from plutonium production, was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981 amidst the screams of US wimps and lefties.

The empty saber-rattling and posturing gave Bush little time to posture as Environmental President also, but his administration ably managed the Green agenda.

The NRC finalized a rule on uranium tailings, jibing it with Reilly's Clean Air Act. As before, they must be covered by earth until the escape of radon is limited to a ridiculously small amount (20 pCi/m2/sec) which even to close neighbors (in the rare case when there are any) delivers a dose considerably smaller than they get in the average American home (see Bodansky and others, In-door Radon, U. Wash. Press, 1987, p.48.); thereafter the site must be left in a condition that requires no ongoing maintenance. The purpose of this hysteria is not safety, but deindustrialization: to pay for the totally unnecessary inspections of these sites by government helicopters, the owner of a uranium operation has to shell out $25,000 to be allowed to abandon it. On the other hand, few small uranium prospectors, miners and millers in the West will be affected: they have long since been driven out of business by envi-ronmental hysteria and government regulations.

But here is a new one: Louisiana's and Reilly's EPA have just discovered that oil is radioactive (as are all fossil fuels). The earth's crust contains thorium, radium, and polonium almost everywhere. The water circulating with the "mud" of drilling operations gets slightly more radioactive than it was before, and where its deposits accumulate, e.g. in water ponds in oil fields, they may reach radia-tion levels which, an article in the New York times (12/3/90) claims, can reach 5 to 30 times the level allowed for nuclear plants. As-suming that this is true (quite an assumption for the NYT), that means a level of 2 to 12 millinaders/year (one millinader, or 25 mrem, is the annual dose Ralph Nader gets from his own blood), or 50% more than the average natural background in the US. There are spots in the US, of course, where the natural back-ground is 5 or 6 times higher than that.

If they really wanted to see radioactivity, they would take a look at geothermal, but that would be unkind; you just don't do that kind of thing to a "soft" source.

But to top it off, Reilly's boys from his Air Office have issued a memo suggesting that 90% of all new cars beginning in 1995 would be required to be capable of operating on more than one fuel type," so that they are weaned off gasoline, which would be rationed. The name of this rose, which smells just as sweet, is "allowance:" Dealers would be given allowances by Big Brother, so as to "cut petroleum-based fuel to acceptable levels by 2005," where "acceptable" means approved by the EPA Kommissariat (WSJ 12/11/90).

Amateurs! Amateurs! Now is the time to import the seasoned experts from Soviet central planning. Within two years there would be only two brands of fuel: one prohibited, the other compulsory, and both unavailable.