36 



Mr. Weldon. Thank you, Mr. Bryn, and thank vou both for the 

 excellent testimony. I am sure we will have a numoer of questions, 

 so I will start off and iust ask a few myself so that we can give 

 everyone a chance to ask you questions and come back for a second 

 round. 



Dr. Yablokov, you referred to the London Convention. As my col- 

 league and friend, Mr. Spratt, mentioned, this administration did, 

 in fact, change the previous position of this country in regard to the 

 London Convention. As a matter of fact, a number of us involved 

 in the GLOBE organization here signed a letter to the President 

 urging him to reverse that policy, to support the convention and 

 make it the official policy of this country to stop the dumping. That 

 is when I introduced legislation, which passed the House in the 

 last session, to codify that. Hopefully, this session, we will get the 

 Senate to follow suit to put it into law. 



My question has to do with some recent reports that I picked up 

 in a statement by Victor Kotsenko which appeared in the Moscow 

 press on November 1 in regard to his prediction that Russia per- 

 haps would make an announcement as early as December that it 

 may resume the practice of dumping its liquid nuclear waste in the 

 oceans. Would you comment on that and whether or not you think 

 that is valid? 



Dr. Yablokov. I only have to say that literally 10 days ago, we 

 had the new Russian parliament pass a special new law regarding 

 water code [?], a special article of this water code. Any nuclear 

 dumping is strictly prohibited. But the situation is complicated, be- 

 cause aifter this law, our parliament passed the next law about the 

 use of nuclear energy, and under the next law, using nuclear en- 

 ergy, they have passed some loophole and mentioned that, yes, nu- 

 clear dumping is principally prohibited, but in some cases it is pos- 

 sible under some condition and so on and so on and so on. 



So now we have a contradiction between the laws. In the juridi- 

 cal sense, the water code is a much higher law than the ordinary 

 law about nuclear energy, but let us see what happens. I do not 

 know. 



Mr. Weldon. Thank you. Dr. Yablokov. In your testimony, your 

 oral and your written, you mention that you thought that 2 years 

 ago we were very close to an agreement on solving some of the en- 

 vironmental problems but that there were delays. I think you spe- 

 cifically cited the State Department. 



They are going to be testifying in the next panel, and perhaps 

 they would disagree, but I would ask you to elaborate on your com- 

 ments and what the Russian perspective is in terms of why the bu- 

 reaucracy eventually caused that agreement to fall apart and tell 

 us in your own observations what happened and where we are now 

 in terms of perhaps restarting that process. 



Dr. Yablokov. I can say that 3 years ago, 2V'2 years ago, I per- 

 sonally participated in the preparing of this law. I know that this 

 law passed, maybe you have other procedure, but in Russia we 

 have such procedure. Any international agreement has to pass 

 through all Federal agencies and each Federal agency has to sign 

 it, not quite to sign it, with some addition and so on. 



We had been lucky that the Minister of Defense and all other 

 powerful ministers signed this agreement, this draft agreement 2 



