Iraq can reach civilian targets in Israel with long-range missiles.
Its missiles also pose a threat to the American forces now arriving in Saudi
Arabia.

Israeli Aircraft Industries developed the Hetz to defend Israel and
to collaborate with the US’s Strategic Defense Initiative (star wars). The
US government is paying most of the anticipated $800 million (Pounds sterling
450 million) development costs.

The company says that the missile would be the first weapon capable
of destroying at a safe distance ballistic missiles that re-enter the atmosphere.
Iraq’s Soviet- and Chinese-made ballistic missiles have a range of between
600 and 3100 kilometres. Unconfirmed reports say that the Hetz can climb
at a speed of Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) to a maximum height
of 30 kilometres. Also, it can manoeuvre in flight at accelerations of up
to 200 times that of gravity. The prototype is 6 metres long and 60 centimetres
in diameter.

The Board for International Broadcasting, a US government organisation
that oversees Radio Free Europe, together with the Voice of America, wants
to promote ‘democratic values, human rights, and peace among nations’. The
BIB has drawn up a contract worth $300 million to build the station. The
British company Marconi will be among the bidders for the contract.

The relay station would consist of 16 transmitting towers and 37 curtain
antennas – vertical wires stretched from suspension cables – as well as
several receivers, dish antennas, and a complex of buildings. It would cover
about 800 hectares in the Aravah Valley, 35 kilometres south of the Dead
Sea and near the border with Jordan.

Many environmental groups, including the Society for the Protection
of Nature in Israel and the Audubon Society and Friends of the Earth in
the US, have attacked the proposals. ‘It’s a dinosaur,’ says Brock Evans,
the vice president of the Audubon Society, which is based in Washington
DC.

The proposed station is being debated in the Knesset and in Congress.
The environmental critics say political changes in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe have eliminated the need for the station, which they say
will be an eyesore.

‘It would be a nest of immense towers, each 200 metres high,’ Evans
told a Congressional committee investigating the plan. He said the station
would be ‘glowing all night, humming all day long with electromagnetic radiation’.
He argued that it would be ‘visible – forever – for tens of miles across
the flat and mostly pristine upper Negev landscape’.

The station would lie along the Syrian-East African Rift Valley, over
which millions of birds migrate each year. During the day, the rising warm
air from the desert draws the birds to that route, says Evans.

The towers and guy wires that steady them present a fatal obstacle to
the birds, according to Evans and other environmentalists. In the US, say
the opponents, transmission towers kill a million birds a year. And the
station’s curtain antennas would form a deadly net for birds, they say.

About 120 people live near the proposed site, and they claim that the
electromagnetic radiation from the transmitters could be dangerous. Elihu
Richter, head of occupational medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
says the electromagnetic field for the settlement has been calculated by
Israeli authorities at 2 volts per metre. That is far lower, he says, than
the internationally agreed limit of 71 volts per metre set by the American
National Standards Institute.

Richter points out, however, that people near the station might be exposed
to stronger levels of electromagnetic radiation over short periods. He also
says that the standards for exposure are not up to date and are based on
‘healthy workers’, ignoring infants, pregnant women, the old and the sick.

Israel has studied how the project would affect the environment, and
has pronounced it safe. The BIB and its backers in the US argue that the
migratory path of birds between Europe and Africa is not over the station,
and that radio-wave energy is negligible anyway.

The Voice of America transmits short-wave signals from a station in
North Carolina in the US directly over the Cape Hatteras National Seashore,
a major bird sanctuary. According to the station’s backers, these broadcasts
have not produced any ill effects on wildlife. The BIB has promised that
a bird monitoring station will be provided for the Aravah Valley to make
sure migrations are not disrupted.

The Israeli Air Force uses much of the nearby desert for bombing and
strafing runs and training flights. Air Force officials have said that the
transmissions might interfere with the navigation electronics of their aircraft.
The Israeli Air Force told American officials last week that it would have
to protect the ‘fly-by-wire’ automated controls on its F-16 aircraft if
the station is built. The controls are vulnerable to interference from signals
that might drift above the station’s normal frequency range of between 6
and 25 megahertz.

According to Yoav Sagi, chairman of the Society for the Protection of
Nature in Israel, the Air Force plans to shift its activities to a wilderness
area to the south if the proposal goes ahead. ‘The area comprises striking
canyons through which winds a section of the ancient Nabatean spice route
from Arabia to the Mediterranean,’ Sagi told Congress in February. The land
supports endangered species such as gazelles, eagles and vultures and, says
Sagi, even a few leopards.

Israel’s environment ministry has taken a strong stand against the government’s
insistence on continuing with the project. But Ronnie Milo, the environment
minister, was moved in a reshuffle last week, and his replacement, Rafael
Edri, is expected to take a less active stand.

The communications ministry, meanwhile, has pushed strongly for the
transmitter site to be built. It has consulted Elinor Adair, an expert who
says that the station would pose no health risk to either humans or birds
from thermal pollution.

Another pressure group, the Israel Agency for Nuclear Information, and
researchers at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem have also attacked the
plans.

However, one Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, last week quoted a confidential
Kremlin report as saying that as many as 450 000 Jews were eventually planning
to emigrate, possibly bringing the number of emigre scientists to 10 000.
Many Israelis are concerned about whether their country can absorb such
numbers.

The decision to allow this brain drain appears to be a deliberate policy
by Mikhail Gorbachov’s government, say Israeli government officials and
academicians involved in the process of absorbing new immigrants. Moscow
News, a Soviet newspaper closely identified with Mikhail Gorbachov’s policies
of glasnost and perestroika, recently published an article supporting the
free emigration of scientists on the grounds that the Soviet system has
placed a stranglehold on scientific innovation.

The author of the article, Leonard Nikishin, said that the USSR may
even have more to gain from its own scientists by allowing them access to
better facilities in Israel, and then reaping the benefits through new cultural
and scientific exchange deals.

Nikishin added that the Soviet Union would be better off allowing its
scientists to go wherever they can do their best work, and then importing
the finished technology that would not have been developed otherwise. The
signing of the first scientific agreement between the countries and the
recent visit of a Soviet delegation may encourage this trend.

Israel’s scientific establishment is in a panic, however, trying to
assimilate so many new scientists. There are only about 4700 scientists
in all disciplines in the country’s seven universities, and the economic
downturn of the last five years has made thousands of scientists and engineers
unemployed, contributing to Israel’s own brain drain, mainly to the US.

The main pressure on Israel is to employ the immigrants quickly, says
Viktor Brailovsky, who was not allowed to work as a mathematician during
the 15 years he was refused an exit visa, and is now at Tel Aviv University.
He says that work is of supreme importance to immigrants, ‘even if there’s
no money in it’.

Dan Amir, the dean of immigrant absorption at the University of Tel
Aviv, says that because scientists are the social elite of the Soviet Jewish
community, Israeli success in finding productive work for immigrant scientists
will be crucial in the decision of other Jews in the Soviet Union to come
to Israel. ‘People will say: ‘If they can’t look after the elite, they won’t
look after us,’ said Amir.

With almost no staff positions available at the universities, and demand
for jobs in industry far exceeding supply, the government is using a system
of stopgap support for immigrant scientists to provide work for at least
some of the immigrants.

Government aid is directed mainly through the Centre for Absorption
in Science, a division of the immigrant absorption ministry. The centre,
created in the 1970s, helps to find immigrant scientists jobs in universities,
research institutes or industry, and pays about 80 per cent of their salaries
and fringe benefits for two years. After this, an employer is expected to
give the scientists tenure and continue to pay their full salaries, but
despite government encouragement this seldom happens in practice.

The science and technology ministry has opened new programmes aimed
at giving immigrants priority employment in ministry-funded research projects
in the seven fields Israel has defined as being of national importance:
biotechnology; neurobiology; materials; lasers; superconductivity; artificial
intelligence and computers; and environmental studies. It is also planning
to rejuvenate science teaching in Israel, which now suffers from a serious
manpower shortage, by training a large number of immigrants as science teachers
in secondary schools and colleges – with the perk of researching part-time.