The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MARGARET WARNER: Good evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Jim Lehrer's on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight, a summary of the news, an in-depth look at the North Korean nuclear facility causing such alarm, an encore report on big city sprawl, part of our "How We Live" series, a conversation about war's strange hold on the human psyche, a Brazilian pop star who sings about his country, and an essay in praise of idleness.

NEWS SUMMARY

MARGARET WARNER: North Korea came under sharp new criticism today. Mohamed el-Baradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, accused the Communist state of engaging in "nuclear brinkmanship." And the South Korean president told his cabinet, "We can never go along with North Korea's nuclear weapons development." Over the past week, the North has taken steps to restart a nuclear reactor at the Yongbyon complex, north of the capital. The reactor generates plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons. North Korea insisted again today it simply needs the reactor to generate electricity. Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians today in a series of raids across the West Bank. We have a report from Nicole Clements of Associated Press Television News.

NICOLE CLEMENTS: In Nablus, Palestinians protesting the curfew threw stones at soldiers. Troops opened fire, killing an 18-year-old apparently not involved in the clashes. 20 more were wounded, three seriously. Israel continued its policy of targeting militants, killing a local leader of Islamic Jihad after a fierce gun battle. In one incident Israeli troops fired at the main guard room at the hospital come pound in Ramallah. One guard was killed, another three arrested.

GHASSAN KHATIB, Palestinian Employment Minister: I think this last Israeli assassination which ended up by killing two Palestinians in the middle of Ramallah is a continuity of the daily killing policy of Israel.

RANAAN GISSIN, Israeli Prime Minister's Spokesman: We have no policy of assassinating Palestinians or killing Palestinians. Our policy is to stop terrorism. And since we are witnessing this wave of terrorist activity and we're intent on stopping it, in order to prevent escalation, today was, I would say, rather a successful day.

NICOLE CLEMENTS: Israel says five of the seven Palestinians killed across the region on Thursday were wanted fugitives. Not so this... not so in the eyes of the thousands of mourners who braved the cold to bury one of the militants killed on Thursday. For them, he represents another martyr to the Palestinian struggle.

MARGARET WARNER: Also today, Israeli forces reimposed a curfew in Bethlehem after a two-day Christmas respite. A West Virginia contractor won nearly $315 million last night in the multi-state Powerball lottery. It's the largest prize ever claimed by a single ticket holder in any lottery in the world. The winner was 55-year-old Andrew Jackson Whittaker, a construction company owner. He said he didn't know he'd won until this morning because the numbers he saw last night were incorrect.

ANDREW JACKSON WHITTAKER: At 5:00 I got up and turned the TV on. I seen the ticket had been won from my gas station that I buy gas and get me a biscuit from every morning. And I told my wife, the odds of selling me a power ball in four numbers and selling somebody else a power ball in five numbers is astronomical. I said let me see that ticket. I looked at that ticket and sure enough, we had the winner. We were very excited.

MARGARET WARNER: Jackson said he'd use the money to help his church and to possibly expand his business. He opted to take one lump sum payment of $170 million. After taxes he'll actually receive $111 million. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 15.5 points to close near 8433. The NASDAQ fell more than four points to close just under 1368. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Korea's nuclear complex, how we live, a book about war, a singer and his country, and an essay in praise of slowing down.

FOCUS TOWARD THE BRINK?

MARGARET WARNER: First, to North Korea. As we've been reporting, over the past week North Korea has dismantled UN Monitoring equipment at its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. It has also started moving fresh fuel into a reactor there. The reactor produces weapons- grade plutonium. Both steps violate a 1994 agreement with the U.S., under which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for shipments of fuel oil and western help in building two light water reactors. The North says it needs to restart the Yongbyon reactor to generate electricity because the West has suspended the fuel oil shipments. The shipments were halted after the North admitted in October that it's been pursuing a separate uranium-based weapons program. Here to help us sort through all this and for a primer on the controversial site are: David Albright, an outside analyst for the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1990s. He's now president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank that focuses on nonproliferation issues. And Leonard Spector, who worked on the North Korean issue at the Department of Energy after the '94 agreement was struck. He's now deputy director of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Welcome to you both.

David Albright, beginning with you, give us a sense of the size of this complex.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Yongbyon is very large. It has maybe five to ten separate areas that are involved in various parts of the nuclear industry including making plutonium, separating plutonium, making fuel. It's... thousands of people work there. It's also constructed in such a way that buildings are isolated from each other by hills making it a very difficult military target.

MARGARET WARNER: It's quite secret. They guard it.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: No. It's very secret. Everything in North Korea is secret but this is particularly secret. It's -- very few people have ever gotten in there.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Help us get in there as much as we can, Leonard Spector. We have some satellite images we can put up of this complex. Start... what are the facilities of major concern that make up the chain to producing a nuclear weapon? Start with the first one.

LEONARD SPECTOR: Well, the first one of particular importance is the reactor itself. This is where fresh fuel comes in and gets irradiated and where plutonium is produced.

MARGARET WARNER: This is this five megawatt reactor, what, designed by the Soviets.

LEONARD SPECTOR: Designed by the soviets but built by the North Koreans. It's operated intermittently over the years, frozen since 1994 under the agreed framework.

MARGARET WARNER: And as I understand it in the time that it did operate, what, seven or so years, it produced enough plutonium for what -- one or two nuclear weapons?

LEONARD SPECTOR: That's correct. The U.S. Government estimate is that the weapons were actually constructed during the early 1990s.

MARGARET WARNER: All right, David Albright, now when we say that a reactor like this produces plutonium, what are we really talking about? What form? Is this the fuel rods?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: It's actually -- you make the plutonium by taking or using the reactor to produce neutrons to make the plutonium in the uranium. And so the plutonium is a very small fraction of the fuel, and so you have to... and it's also a lot of radioactive materials produced so it's very hot, very dangerous to get near. And so you take it and put it in a spent fuel pond.

MARGARET WARNER: We have another image of that that we can show where that is. This is where... that's the spent fuel storage building.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: That's right. It's next to the reactor. There's a tunnel connecting the reactor to the spent fuel pond and so the fuel has been stored there. And so North Korea is believed to have unloaded the reactor perhaps twice. I mean there's some controversy over the first unloading. But certainly when it was unloaded in 1994, there was enough plutonium in that spent fuel to make about five nuclear weapons.

MARGARET WARNER: Then when we say it was put in cooling ponds, literally water.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Just water.

MARGARET WARNER: What is it?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Water.

MARGARET WARNER: Just lying on the bottom.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Ten meters of water or so down in the bottom.

LEONARD SPECTOR: But they're typically stored vertically. They have been cannisterized so the water doesn't corrode them. This was done by the Department of Energy during the last five or six years.

MARGARET WARNER: Now then, take us to the third stage. If you wanted to take the plutonium and these rods and essentially convert it for use in weapons, what would you do and where on the map-- and I think we'll go back to the first image would it happen?

LEONARD SPECTOR: You have to move the fuel rods, which are radioactive and dangerous, from the spent fuel pond across the site to another location -- the reprocessing the facility I think it's listed as a radio chemical laboratory.

MARGARET WARNER: That's right. That's what the North Koreans call it. That's really the processing....

LEONARD SPECTOR: That's correct. It has been shut down under the agreed framework. There is anxiety that it may be started up relatively soon. There have been reports that North Korea is on the market for the chemicals that are needed in the process. How fast they might move if they got the spent fuel rods there is not really known.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. But go back to the idea of reprocessing. What does that really mean.

LEONARD SPECTOR: That means the spent fuel rods are brought in. They're dissolved in my trick acid and a set of chemical steps is taken to pull out the plutonium, unused uranium and radioactive waste products with the result that you have the purified plutonium then potentially available for use in nuclear weapons.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. So David Albright, when we say that all these sites-- and I guess others at the complex-- were sealed in '94, what does that really mean?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Well, what it meant is they were shut down. And then the International Atomic Energy Agency installed cameras so it would be easier to observe that the facilities were shut down. They put in seals, which are essentially just wires with a special tag on it that's... if you break it, the inspectors can know that it's broken. It's not really a deterrent. There's nothing intrinsic about it. I mean, the North Koreans can cover the cameras; they can cut the seals and restart. Inspectors remain at the site, however. There's two inspectors, and so the most important part of the inspection process is the inspectors themselves. And so they're still able to go to all these different sites and confirm that at least now the sites have not restarted.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Now that we -- hopefully we understand what's at this complex -- what is it, explain what it is that North Korea has done in the past ten days in these three places, if all three, that has caused such alarm.

LEONARD SPECTOR: All right. What they have done is taken all the seals and all the cameras out, made them unusable. So we no longer have that kind of capability for observing. We do have inspectors at the site. They have also now moved fresh fuel to the reactor site anticipating that it will be refueled and started up. They have said they will use it for electricity which nobody believes but that is the rationale. If the material goes into the reactor, it will have to cook for a spell maybe a year before enough plutonium would be available to be reprocessed and then available for weapons.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. But let's go back to what they've moved in. As I've read they've moved in the IAEA says a thousand fuel rods. What percentage is that of what is needed to really get that reactor up and running again?

LEONARD SPECTOR: I think it's a fair percentage. I'll defer to David.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: It's a little more than 10%, a little more than 10% of the core. Most people believe they have enough fuel to load the core.

MARGARET WARNER: Where do they get the fuel?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: There's another complex at Yongbyon that deals with fuel fabrication.

MARGARET WARNER: Let's put that up if we've got it. I think it's the second slide or the first slide.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: It's down at the bottom of the picture.

MARGARET WARNER: I see. That very bottom one. All they had to do was truck it or take it to the reactor.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: It was in storage at different places. Some may have been produced and never turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency for inspection. They have quite a bit stockpiled. It's a fairly large facility. It hasn't restarted. I mean this would all be fuel produced prior to 1994.

MARGARET WARNER: But did you just say... forgive me but did you just say that they think or you think or U.S. intelligence believes or IAEA does -- that they've got enough fuel rods on site to actually reload this reactor and get it going?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: To reload it. That's right. They have enough. But the most urgent thing though in terms of international concern is what happens to the spent fuel.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Has anything happened to the spent fuel?

LEONARD SPECTOR:So far not that we're aware of. The cameras and seals are gone though so they are getting ready it would appear to take some action there. I think that's what is making everyone especially nervous.

MARGARET WARNER: And if they were to do something with the spent fuel rods in that sort of site number two, they would what, just take it to the reprocessing plant?

LEONARD SPECTOR: They would do that and then they would start the reprocessing plant. Now, that doesn't happen overnight. We obviously have a lot of preparations that have to be done at the reprocessing plant. It's not quite clear how large it is in terms of its scale, how fast they can move the fuel through. And also it should be relatively visible because the... this has to be done above ground in trucks. So we will probably have some warning but once the process begins this is going to be a very, very dangerous period because certainly this will be a very significant red line for the United States.

MARGARET WARNER: Can it be... does it take both satellite imagery and the I gather the three inspectors on the ground right now to really feel confident that we know what's going on there or if North Korea were to kick out the inspectors, could it all still be observed?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Well, the inspectors are the most important. I mean, because there you really know what's going on. I mean, with satellite imagery you can tell if the site is started. I mean, the reactor has a cooling tower that emits steam when it's operating, the processing plant is going to emit kind of a brownish gas that can be seen. But it's very hard to know precisely what's going on. In fact, have they been separating plutonium or a large amount? Are they doing a little bit. I mean, it's very hard to tell with commercial satellite imagery.

MARGARET WARNER: So you started to answer this before and I sort of cut you off. But let's say there are several theories as to why the North Koreans are doing it. One is they just want to get U.S. attention and get this non-aggression pact they've been wanting all along. Another is of course their rationale is we need it for electricity. Now, the U.S. says that's implausible. Is it implausible, if so, why?

LEONARD SPECTOR: Well, it's implausible because I don't believe this facility has ever produced electricity. Secondly we have had other periods of cut off of heavy fuel oil. Sometimes the Congress would not appropriate the money for a number of months. Sometimes there were just other delays that were just because of the way these shipments go. So at this point simply because there's been a delay of one month or a cut off to say they need to go back and start producing electricity, I think is not a very credible argument. So I think what they're really up to is getting our attention and perhaps worse.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree that it's not plausible to say it's for electricity?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: It has a turbine, but it produces a very small amount of electricity. And then if they only wanted electricity even the small quantity why would they take the seals off a reprocessing plant? It's just not credible.

MARGARET WARNER: Stages 2 and 3 there would be no reason to take seals off then because they could do it all with the reactor.

DAVID ALBRIGHT: That's right.

MARGARET WARNER: If the reason instead is as Mr. Spector put it something worse, that is that they're really bent on reviving this whole nuclear program, if they went all out, what time frame are we looking at between now and when they would be generating enough weapons grade material to produce additional nuclear weapons?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Well, they've maintained the reactor and the reprocessing plant. They actually did maintenance over the summer at the reprocessing plant so I think the estimates on restart of both facilities are about one to three months. And sometimes they do things quicker. So I think by... within six months to a year, they could have separated out all the plutonium from the spent fuel as they did move forward, and perhaps even quicker than six months if they take special steps. Some of those are just ignoring what we would consider radiation safety standards and taking risks that we would never do.

MARGARET WARNER: Like?

DAVID ALBRIGHT: Well the fuel that's stored in the spent fuel pond is extremely dangerous to actually handle. It's very old. It was never intended for long-term storage. If you take it out of the cask and it gets into air, some of it can actually spontaneous ignite and you have a fire and you could have quite a mess in the reprocessing plant.

MARGARET WARNER: What would you add to the time frame?

LEONARD SPECTOR: Well, I think the particular danger is that once you begin to see any movement of the spent fuel, diplomacy is not going to have very much time to operate. Already I believe the administration is going to try to get the IAEA to step in, perhaps this will go to the Security Council. But once the reprocessing gets ready to roll, things are going to happen faster perhaps than diplomatic developments can catch up. And that might lead to a military confrontation.

MARGARET WARNER: So really that pond with the spent fuel rods, that is the red line that intelligence and the inspectors are really looking at.

LEONARD SPECTOR: I would think so.

MARGARET WARNER: Gentlemen, Thank you both.

MARGARET WARNER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, "How We Live," a book about war, a Brazilian pop star, and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay.

ENCORE HOW WE LIVE

MARGARET WARNER: Over the past year, Ray Suarez has reported from around the country in a series we call "how we live," looking at how and where Americans live their lives. Tonight, an encore look at one of those stories on the problems of urban sprawl in Atlanta.

RAY SUAREZ: In many ways, metropolitan Atlanta is like cities and their suburbs around the country. Only here, the problems are all worse. Ever longer commutes...

WOMAN: My commute from Lasolia to here takes me now an hour.

RAY SUAREZ: ...Downtown housing prices spiking...

MAN: I would love to live in town, but you can't afford to live in town and have the kind of space you can get 15-16 miles from town.

RAY SUAREZ: ...Debates over building new freeways.

MAN: If we don't build it, we add 400,000 more people in the north end of our county, nobody moves.

RAY SUAREZ: The Atlanta metropolitan area is now in its third consecutive decade of rapid growth: In jobs, in residents, in wealth, and in size. And it's struggling to control the sprawl. There are no rivers or mountain ranges, no natural boundaries to block Atlanta's expansion. It has absorbed all or part of 13 counties in north central Georgia. About 500 acres of land are bulldozed here every week to make way for new development. In the last 20 years, the population has doubled, but land is being developed far faster, so the number of miles driven by the average Atlantan more than doubled.

MAN ON STREET: There's a store that's about a mile and a half away, Kroger, but we don't ever walk there.

RAY SUAREZ: The design of the suburbs makes driving a necessity, not an option. Local zoning laws require set distances between offices, retail stores, and housing. And walking anywhere can be tough, if not dangerous.

MAN: In the subdivision I live in, there is not a sidewalk to be seen.

WOMAN: We don't have any sidewalks or parks, anywhere around that we could get to without getting in a car.

RAY SUAREZ: Richard Tucker is the President of the Chamber of Commerce of the fastest growing county in the region, Gwinnett.

RICHARD TUCKER, Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce: The metro Atlanta way of life is almost like out West, you know, one man, one horse. We're one man, one woman, one automobile, and that's a hard pattern to break.

RAY SUAREZ: Except it's becoming less convenient. In the last decade, the number of hours spent sitting in traffic has doubled.

MIRIAM FAROOQ: Such huge cars and just one person sitting in each car. It's just ridiculous.

RAY SUAREZ: The commute frustrates Miriam Farooq.

MIRIAM FAROOQ: You want to start your day with a happy, smiling face, and you don't want to be, like... by the time you reach work or school, it's, like, an hour and a half of a ride, and you're all tensed up, and your day starts all messed up.

RAY SUAREZ: Eight months ago, Miriam and her husband Ameen moved 30 miles from downtown to get a larger but still affordable home for their three children. Ameen Farooq's ten-mile commute often takes an hour or more. A professor of architecture and urban planning, he is worried that the traffic congestion and rapid expansion of subdivisions are affecting the area's water, air quality, and green space.

AMEEN FAROOQ: The first thing, which I noticed is, you know, the lack of trees. Now this subdivision has only 104 houses -- a very nice, clean subdivision without much trees, so landscaping becomes the major problem. And especially, you know, in the summertime, you can see the difference, you can feel the heat of the summer, because there's not many trees here, you know.

RAY SUAREZ: According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, fewer trees and more asphalt and air conditioners have created a growing heat island effect throughout metro Atlanta. The area's water supply is dwindling, and air pollution is increasing. When ozone smog is high, the Centers for Disease Control has reported a 35% increase in emergency room visits for respiratory illnesses. In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that Atlanta had violated the 1990 Clean Air Act, meaning the region would lose over $1.7 billion in highway funding. Wesley Wolf of the Southern Environmental Law Center explains.

WESLEY WOLF, Southern Environmental Law Center: The sanctions are you have to redirect your transportation monies from projects that pollute the air to projects that help clean up the air.

RAY SUAREZ: Two opposing camps responded to the crisis with different strategies. Wolf's organization is part of a coalition that has used the Clean Air Act as leverage to slow sprawl and highway construction, and give people an alternative to driving.

WESLEY WOLF: The federal transportation money can keep flowing to this region and other regions like Atlanta. The region just cannot spend that money on things that pollute the air. We can spend our money on transit that helps improve air quality, we can spend that money on pedestrian safety, highway safety projects, intersection improvements, other sorts of projects like that, but we can't dig the hole deeper.

RAY SUAREZ: The second camp's strategy, led by the suburban counties, was to clear out traffic by building more roads. Federal and local transportation officials created a plan that would postpone the Clean Air Act's 1999 deadline for cleaner air until 2005, and allow road building to resume. Richard Tucker backs that plan. Along with the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce Post, he's on the board of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.

RICHARD TUCKER: Whether we like it or not, we have to provide for people to drive in a car. If they want to drive alone, that's their prerogative. We want to make it... we want to incent them to drive in carpools. That's why we have HOV lanes, that's why we have a new bus system that just came on line last November that is over capacity now. We already need new buses, so some people are wanting to do that. But as a percentage of the four million people in this region, only 2% to 3% are going to use those means of transportation today. Now they may use more in time, and that's certainly the long- range plan, but we can't neglect the road building that needs to continue.

RAY SUAREZ: The most controversial part of the Transportation Authority's plan is to build the Northern Arc Freeway, a 65 mile crescent across three counties, 25 to 30 miles north of the city's limits. Wayne Hill, the longtime chairman of the Gwinnett County Commission, says that unless the arc is built, pollution problems will increase, not decease.

WAYNE HILL, Chairman, Gwinnett County Commission: If it's not built, I think we're going to have major congestion, even more than we have today. I think you will see long-term probably the economy go down.

RAY SUAREZ: In Hill's vision, the Northern Arc will end at the intersection of two other highways in Gwinnett County and those two intersections will eventually anchor a new city the size of Baltimore or Boston.

WAYNE HILL: And you got the mall of Georgia right there.

RAY SUAREZ: So that's about ten miles.

WAYNE HILL: That's about ten miles.

RAY SUAREZ: Downtown Atlanta has its own set of problems created by urban sprawl and the individual choices that make up the way we live. New arrivals, increasing demand, and horrible commutes have driven up demand and prices in desirable Atlanta neighborhoods. And for all the talk about loving the sidewalk, corporate and residential high rises with no street life continue to rise in isolation, and apartment complexes hide in gated cul-de-sacs. The upshot: Even city residents are still dependent on their cars. The public transportation system suffers from a lack of funding support from the surrounding counties.

WESLEY WOLF, Southern Environmental Law Center: We do have a transit system, it does function, it goes to certain places. If you live in the right place, it works for you. If you don't, it doesn't.

RAY SUAREZ: One strategy of developers downtown is to fill in empty space. In midtown Atlanta, Atlantic Station, one of many new projects, is under construction on the site of an old steel mill. Developer Jim Jacoby touts the 140-acre site's potential, saying it's well worth the challenges of cleaning an old Brownfield site, and building a bridge across a river of traffic to attach a new neighborhood to the rest of the city.

JIM JACOBY, Atlantic Station Developer: We're creating a sort of a magnet for people to want to come back downtown, to be at the art center, to be able to walk to work, to live, work, and play in an area that's better for you, better for the environment, and having this opportunity is creating the opportunity for people to come back into the city.

RAY SUAREZ: Thanks to new zoning laws, Atlantic Station's high-density design will feature a mix of residential, office, and retail space, flanked by sidewalks and trees.

JIM JACOBY: The residential units will on the third and fourth floor of these four buildings right here overlooking the one acre park.

RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: Planning commissioner Michael Dobbins has worked with Atlantic Station from the start, and believes the design fits with the city's future plans.

MICHAEL DOBBINS, Commissioner, Department of Planning, Development, and Neighborhood Conservation: The basic strategy that the city of Atlanta has undertaken is to create the kind of environment that responds to the markets that we're seeing emerging and leveling out across the region, which is Generation X folks and empty nesters and seniors, who are showing a clear desire to live in an area that's more walkable, where services are closer at hand, where there are options to having to get out of your car, where there are housing choice options. So we've geared our strategies to induce developments that respect the sidewalk and the street, and reestablish the sidewalk as sort of the front door of the activities of the city.

RAY SUAREZ: As part of his sidewalk strategy, Dobbins looked for a way to get people out of cars. What he found was the much ballyhooed segway human transporter, a battery-powered device steered by chip-driven gyroscopes. It reaches 12.5 miles per hour and weighs 65 pounds.

MICHAEL DOBBINS: It does seem to be very promising with respect to displacing that short-hop car trip. People will walk three or four blocks, but not much further. It really is a niche between walking and driving.

RAY SUAREZ: City police have successfully used the new scooter. It's easy to learn, and fun to drive.

RAY SUAREZ: It's great. You don't get aerobic on it, though. (Laughs)

RAY SUAREZ: It's going to take more than a newfangled scooter or even Dobbins' years of work planning for Atlanta to combat urban sprawl. The challenge for Atlanta is giving more people choices in housing and in transportation that don't bust the family budget. Miriam and Ameen Farooq's situation, having left the center city for more affordable suburban real estate, is very common.

MIRIAM FAROOQ: If we were to buy a house there, we wouldn't be able to afford it, and this is the only reason we moved here. We did go and look around, you know, saw some beautiful houses there, but they were, like, one- fourth of this place.

RAY SUAREZ: Multiply the Farooq family's quandary by thousands, and you have a classic sprawl trap. Families moving further and further out means more development, more roads, and more car trips. The forces powering Atlanta's outward expansion are so strong, that it's unlikely the sprawl will halt anytime soon.

CONVERSATION

MARGARET WARNER: Next, another in our conversations with authors of new books, and to Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." Its author is Chris Hedges, who, for over 15 years, covered conflicts from Central America, to the Balkans, to the Middle East and Persian Gulf. He was a reporter with the "Dallas Morning News," the "Christian Science Monitor" and National Public Radio. Since 1990 he's been a correspondent for the "New York Times," where he and a team won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting after the September 11 attacks. Chris Hedges, welcome.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

TERENCE SMITH: The title, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"-- tell me what you mean by that.

CHRIS HEDGES: From every conflict I've covered, war as an enterprise is something that's filled lives. It obliterates the alienation and distance we often feel, especially in modern society. It gives us a sense of purpose, it ennobles us as a people, it allows us to jettison individual consciousness for a goal, a noble goal, and it... it allows us to suspend questioning, to stop questioning for the great enterprise in front of us. And unfortunately, that's why war at its inception is often met with such exhilaration.

TERENCE SMITH: You also describe war as a narcotic to which people, you included, can and have become addicted.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, I... yeah, I think war is a drug, and maybe the supreme drug of human existence.

TERENCE SMITH: Explain that.

CHRIS HEDGES: It has a fantastic... a quality of the grotesque, a dark beauty; and the bible called it "the lust of the eye," and warned believers against it. It creates a landscape that's almost beyond the realm of imagination. Of course you have the adrenaline rush, you have that exhilaration that comes with that constant flirtation with danger. And it becomes hard to live outside of its environment, often even for the victims. I remember sitting after the war in Sarajevo with friends of mine, and while they didn't wish back the suffering, they missed what war had brought, that sense of immediately... that sense of belonging. I mean, you know, with everybody sort of under the threat of a death sentence, with everybody as a crowd together fighting an external enemy, that loneliness that we all feel in terms of having to face death alone is vanquished and somehow made easier by facing it as a group.

TERENCE SMITH: You also write about how war tends to destroy and distort reality, how we tend-- anybody does-- to demonize our enemies and then excuse our own excesses. Tell me about that.

CHRIS HEDGES: I think that's always part of wartime. When you... you know, war always begins with the dehumanizing of the other through rhetoric, making the other... and I think that's... the flip side of that, of course, is patriotism, which is very thinly veiled self- glorification. And as we glorify and raise ourselves in our own eyes, the natural consequence is that we belittle the other. If you look at the language even now, since post 9/11, we call them "barbarians," they call us "infidels." We speak in wartime-- and this is not unique to us, but I think in all wartime societies, you speak in the jingoism or the clich s that are handed to you by the state. And that's pounded to you, I mean, by... from everywhere, from... by the press, by the government, by even the entertainment industry. And it becomes very, very hard to think outside the box, to articulate whatever disquiet you feel. We saw this in Bosnia, for instance. And that is very much... that's what makes it so hard to voice or articulate dissent in wartime.

TERENCE SMITH: Reading this book, I got the impression that you wrote it in a kind of a fury, and that the fury was maybe partly directed at yourself.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, a fury. It was a hard book to write. Parts of the book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war -- all of the things we're told about war that I had to find out the hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there's a fury at that, it's the mendacity of the entire enterprise.

TERENCE SMITH: There's a passage which, if you would, read to us that sort of addresses this. You have it there.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. "We believe in the nobility an self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover inthe communal struggle the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador or Bosnia or Kosovo, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security."

TERENCE SMITH: And security, is that what you have chosen now for yourself?

CHRIS HEDGES: I wouldn't put it that way. I would say I've chosen not to engage in the necrophilia that is war, not to flirt with my own destruction anymore. You know, the ancient Greeks and Romans... for the ancient Greek and Roman, war was a god. And it began with the sacrifice of the other, but it always ended with self-sacrifice and self-annihilation. And I think when you don't understand war, when you allow war to control you, that's what war's final cost entails: Self- obliteration.

TERENCE SMITH: You know, the book comes out and we're having this conversation at a time when this country is anticipating, possibly moving towards war. Does the rhetoric today echo some of the themes in the book?

CHRIS HEDGES: Very much so. I mean, that... it is the same... it is the same poison, and we have ingested it along with everyone else. I think one of the things that... and in the last Chapter I talk about Freud from civilization and its discontents, where he talks about Eros and Thanatos and that instinct to preserve and conserve, or love and Eros, always vying with the death instinct, the instinct to destroy -- and that for Freud, both within individuals and society, one of these instincts was always ascendant. I think after the Vietnam War we asked questions about ourselves and our nation that made us a better people. In that defeat we were humbled. And there has been a slow, but very steady rehabilitation of war, certainly through the Reagan years, culminating with the Persian Gulf War. We have come to believe, and I think even revel and exalt, in our military prowess, in our strength with the illusion that we can fight wars that are cost- free. Kosovo has done this to us; Bosnia has done this to us. And if history is any guide, our technology will not save us. It did not save the European empires at the end of the 19th century, and it will not save us. And I think that if we steal a line from Freud, "Thanatos is ascendant." We've forgotten what war is; the awful, awful cost that war can exact, and we revel in the death instinct-- and that's what frightens me. And it takes, unfortunately, a lot of bloodletting for societies to wake up.

TERENCE SMITH: So this talk which we hear today of a short war, one that will be over quickly, an illusion?

CHRIS HEDGES: It's hard to say. I think we don't really know what we're getting into Iraq. We know that in the Persian Gulf War, he did want to use his biological and chemical weapons. He could not because he couldn't get the orders down to the front line soldiers. You know, in the Persian... I went into Kuwait with the Marines, and we clashed first with the reservists and the militias, all the good troops. The Republican Guard were up North. And the idea was that he was going to drop this stuff on his own -- and of course us. So we know he can use it. And it doesn't take much to take out a Marine Corps battalion. Will we get in? Hopefully we will. I think that's an unknown. But if we continue this open- ended war on terror, if we keep leapfrogging from conflict into conflict, we're going to get burned eventually. And you have to remember that everybody signed up as fast as they could in 1914 because they thought the war would be over by Christmas. It... once you engage in a war, especially when you engage in a war without the kind of intelligence that you should have, you don't know what you're going to fall into, and once you're in there, it's very hard to get out.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." Chris Hedges, thank you so much.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

FOCUS SONGS OF BRAZIL

MARGARET WARNER: Now, singing the story of Brazil. Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on one of that country's leading musical stars.

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: "For a long time," sings Brazilian pop star Caetano Veloso, "slavery will remain the national characteristic of Brazil." In this song, translated from the Portuguese as "Northern Nights," Veloso uses a 19th century Brazilian text to sing of racial disparity, an issue that remains relevant to Brazilian life today.

(Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: It's the kind of thing Veloso, now 60, has been doing in Brazil for four decades. In his native land, he remains a major cultural figure...

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: ...A songwriter, poet, and provocateur who explores what it means to be Brazilian and part of the larger interconnected world.

(Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: In recent years, he's become more known in the United States. The "New York Times" called him "one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century."

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: He toured the nation this fall, here at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, with the release of a new CD called "Live in Bahia." His 1999 recording, "Livro," won a Grammy Award; and a memoir of his early years, "tropical truth," has just been published in English. Veloso lives in Brazil, but has an apartment in New York, where we talked, first about Brazilian music.

CAETANO VELOS: It is a blend of different African traditions in rhythm, and all of the European ideas of harmony and structure and poetry also. So it has a taste of its own. And it has a very complex history, you know, Brazilian popular music, because Brazil is very big, varied, and racially very mixed, deeply mixed.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the 1960s, Veloso and friends such as Gilberto Gil took traditional Brazilian music and the Bossa Nova sound of Veloso's hero, Koao Gilberto, added poetic and musical influences from far and wide, including rock and roll, and created a movement called Tropicalia. For many in Brazil, it helped signal a new nation, proud of itself and open to the world.

( Singing in Portuguese )

CAETANO VELOS: It had behind it this too big a dream of solving the problem of Brazil, and that has not been solved -- far from it.

JEFFREY BROWN: "Tropicalia" raised too many questions for the oppressive military dictatorship that ruled Brazil in the '60s and '70s. Veloso and Gil were jailed for several months in 1968, and then lived in exile in London before returning home in 1972. It would be another 13 years before democracy was restored to Brazil. For Veloso, it is today a more confident nation, but one still searching for its way.

CAETANO VELOS: Brazil, territorially, it's just as big as the United States, and it is culturally very rich and varied, and economically it's become kind of strong. But it's unresolved, you know, it's unsettled.

JEFFREY BROWN: I just wrote down a quote from the book where you refer to Brazil as "a failed nation ashamed of having once been called a country of the future."

CAETANO VELOS: Social disparity in Brazil is monstrous, and it has been there unchanged for more than four centuries. And this incredible incapacity of distributing wealth is a failure.

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: A Caetano Veloso concert is a jumble of styles: Hard-driving rock... ( rock music playing ) ...solo acoustic love songs... ( soft guitar strumming )

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN:...And, of course, the percussion-led rhythms for which Brazilian music is so famous. (Drums playing ) Veloso is a man obsessed with words.

(Rapping in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: In his rap-like chant called "Lingua," or "Language," he asks the question, "how far can it go, this language?"

CAETANO VELOS: O que pode essa lingua?

CAETANO VELOS: I like talking... talking. I like to listen to people talk. I like to read. I like to write. I like the words. I like poetry and prose and philosophy and essays. I like the words, and I like the Portuguese language.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you're writing a song, do all of these influences, what... the poetry that you're reading, the books that you're reading, the people you're talking to, it all...

CAETANO VELOS: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: ...It's all grist for that?

CAETANO VELOS: Yes, yes. Sometimes they all appear in quotes, you know. Sometimes they just echo. And they would be there, put together, and, you know, it's really very unbalanced. But somehow it feels good. I think we live in an unbalanced era.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you mean?

CAETANO VELOS: I don't think history has ever faced anything like the power and the achievements of the United States, the generosity and the potential of oppression, all the greatness of the United States, you know. On the other hand, distribution of wealth in the world is almost a problem for which nobody can see a practical solution.

JEFFREY BROWN: Brazil, as much as any place in the world in recent years, has aroused such questions about globalization's benefits and harms. In October, the election of labor leader Lula de Silva as president signaled a major political change. The new president has called for greater economic and social equality for Brazil's workers and poor. Veloso sees a key moment for his country's 170 million people.

CAETANO VELOS: What is happening now is that in Brazil, people are kind of happy, you know, and I wouldn't say they are wrong, you know, because it means some kind of Brazilian political originality. It's a challenge filled with many dangers, but fascinating, and really engaging.

( Singing in Portuguese )

JEFFREY BROWN: In his song "May 13," Veloso expresses his engagement in his more accustomed manner: Through joyous music. The song celebrates the day in 1888 when slavery was officially abolished in Brazil.

CAETANO VELOS: Un fin da escravidao da escravidao...

JEFFREY BROWN: Veloso imagines the square in his hometown, the dancing, the happiness; "palm fronds everywhere," he sings, "and the fireworks in the air."

( Singing in Portuguese ) (cheers and applause)

MARGARET WARNER: Much more on Caetano Veloso is available on our web site, including an online forum with the singer, who will take your questions. Please visit us at pbs.Org.

ESSAY IDLENESS PRAISED

MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, essayist Anne Taylor Fleming has some words in praise of idleness.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: I was amused and shocked a few years ago when the first kids I know asked for palm pilots for Christmas. Cell phones I could see-- we are a yakking culture-- but palm pilots for 11-year-olds? Were their technomanias so already intense, not to mention their schedules, that they wanted the latest, greatest gadget for life management? Given their schedules, it's no wonder. Herded here and there, from soccer match to math tutor, weighed down, literally, with homework, these kids have barely a minute to draw breath. Now comes a pioneering study spearheaded by Northwestern University showing that a driven lifestyle can predispose kids for hypertension and heart troubles down the road. Do we need studies to prove these things? I guess we do. But I'm concerned with heart troubles of another kind. A frantic heart simply cannot take its own measure, hear its own voice, sing its own song. What will happen to these kids with no down time, no daydreaming time? How will they figure out who they are and what they believe in and what will make them happy, truly, deep-down happy, not in a crowd, a clique, or a claque, but solo, alone, at rest? That's when you know. That's what idleness is for: Hearing that whisper way inside, the whisper of your own poetry and passions and convictions. Of course, it's not just kids. All of us seem revved up to the max, running here and there, trying to make a living, shuttling children, attending older parents. Even in our cars, we allow ourselves no respite. The automobile used to be a grand cocoon for drifting and daydreaming. Our cars are now crammed with all the trendy noisemakers, the CD players and cell phones and maps that talk to us, as if we cannot stand a quiet, idle moment, just like our restaurants, each one louder than the last, literally programmed for noise with their hard surfaces and thumping sound systems and huge, hovering TV sets. And, of course, leisure time is an oxymoron, everyone at play as teeth-grittingly intent as at work, pushing, pumping, sweating, bungee-jumping, each sport more and more dangerous and extreme, as if we need to keep upping the ante lest there be a moment's respite, a moment to think, a moment of idleness. It feels as if we are all engaged in some frantic game of self-avoidance.

DR. PHIL: Tell me why you think you do this.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: This is an irony in a narcissistic culture that offers up every kind of psycho babbling guru purporting to be a guide to the self and soul, but they are covers, not the real deal. The real deal, the real rooting about, only happens in idleness. So, too, of course, does any truly creative work. It is the product of the mind left free to roam and cogitate and curl up in the corner. It cannot be done in the din, the crowd, not the truly original thinking of poets or philosophers or composers or artists. Only in quietude can we think, imagine, dream, the greats and the rest of us, to whatever degree we each are able. That is my wish for the season: That we all idle a bit more, that we listen to the carols sung by our own souls. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.

RECAP

MARGARET WARNER: Again, the major developments of the day. The head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency accused North Korea of engaging in "nuclear brinkmanship." The North has taken steps to restart a reactor that could be used in producing nuclear weapons. Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians in a series of raids across the West Bank. And a West Virginia contractor claimed the largest-ever jackpot of nearly $315 million in the Power Ball lottery. We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening with David Brooks and Clarence Page, among others. I'm Margaret Warner, thanks for being with us. Good night.