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Vast weapons flow beyond control
Nixon sold unlimited arms to Iran
V- WASHINGTON (UPI) Former
President Richard Nixon secretly or
dered the government to sell Iran any
conventional arms it wants, creating a
vast and continuing flow of weapons now
beyond Pentagon control, the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee reported
yesterday.
<;'■ As a result of Nixon’s July, 1972
decision, it said, the United States has
sold Iran an arsenal worth $lO billion,
including:
—BO ultramodern Fl 4 jet fighters.
37 Hawk anti-aircraft batteries with
1,800 missiles.
Six destroyers more sophisticated
than those being built for the U.S. Navy.
The report said the Pentagon could
Soil activity on Mars may 'mimic' life
, v PASADENA, Calif. (AP) Viking l’s
'life-searching probes continued
yesterday to send a steady stream of
perplexing data that scientists
cautiously said could mean the presence
of living systems on Mars. '
But most scientists were inclined to
take a pessimistic tack, preferring to
f-„ exhaust all possible nonbiological ex
planations for the baffling data before
drawing any conclusions about the
existence of Martian life.
On Saturday, scientists found unex
pected amounts of oxygen in one of the
experiments and said the gas could
, indicate the presence of life, but that it
u'could also have been produced by any
number of chemical reactions.
Flash flood kills
LOVELAND, Colo. (UPI) A flash
flood roared through a northern Rocky
Mountain canyon yesterday,inundating
small towns and sweeping away cam
pers and fishermen. The' flood crest
tossed homes, cars and trucks about like
toys.
Authorities'said at least 60- persons
were killed and 250 injured. Many were
on a weekend holiday celebrating
Colorado’s 100th anniversary of
statehood.
Heavy rains resumed at dark in
popular campgrounds along the Big
Thompson River 10,000 feet high in the
Rockies 45 miles northwest of Denver.
The river, swollen by 10-inch rains,
'gouged through a highway and stranded
some survivors in the mountain town of
Glen Haven.
A temporary morgue was set up in a
two-story hospital in Loveland, a city of
20,000 about 10 miles east of the canyon.
Doctors and Red Cross workers
fingerprinted corpses and checked for
Foreigners leave
TOKYO (AP) The
foreign community began a
mass exodus from Peking
yesterday after Chinese
seismologists, worried by
such signs as the nervous
behavior of zoo animals,
warned again that a major
new earthwake was im
minent. 7
The casualty toll from
Wednesday’s earthquakes
remained unknown to the
outside world. Speculation
based on sketchy reports put
the number of dead and'in
jured at anything from tens of
thousands to one million.
Japan’s Kyodo news
agency reported from the
Chinese capital that
yesterday’s warning was the
first. suggestion that long-
Collegian.
the
daily
The London Tour Bus loads up at the HUB for another in its continuing tours of campus. Campus
' tours increase over the summer.
not keep track of these sales and former
Defense Secretary James Schlesinger
finally appointed a secret agent in 1973 to
find out what was going on.
But Schlesinger’s move backfired, the
report said, when Richard Hollock, his
agent, eventually became an Iranian
government adviser on U.S. weaponry.
“U.S. arms sales to Iran ... have been
out of control,” said Sen. Hubert
Humphrey, D-Minn., in releasing the 59-
page Foreign Relations
report.
“There is ■ little evidence that the
President and the- secretary of state
have recognized the far-reaching foreign
policy implications of the U.S.-Iranian
military relationship.”
Perhaps more telling were the results
of another biology probe aboard the
Viking robot laboratory. the labeled
release experiment which produced
just the kind of data that might be seen if
Martian microbes were living in the test
soil.
In that experiment, a small sample of
Martian soil was moistened with
nutrients laced with radioactive
material, carbon-14.
The assumption behind the ex
periment was that any Martian life form
in the soil would like the earthly’
nutrients, eat them, and release the
tracer carbon in their wastes, as would
earth creatures including humans.
If that happened, a tiny Geiger counter
wedding bands and scars to aid in
identification.
President Ford was asked by Gov.
Richard Lamm and Sen. Gary Hart, D-
Colo., to make federal help available to
the area where damage alone to Bureau
of Reclamation equipment was
estimated at $1 million. Lamm flew over
the scene in a helicopter and said it was
“completely devastated. ”
The flood was the nation’s worst since
the collapse of Idaho’s Grand Teton Dam
in June and the most costly in number of
lives lost since the Rapid City, S.D.,
flood of June 10, 1972, when 237 persons
died.
“We have 43 bodies now in the mor-’
tuary,” said Larimer County Sheriff Bob
Watson. “We know of 20 others that we:
haven’t been able to get to yet.”
An estimated 200-300 survivors, aided
by National Guardsmen dropped in by
helicopter, remained in the canyon
overnight. Rescue operations were
suspended at dark as the rains resumed.
term foreign residents, such
as diplomats and news
reporters, leave the capital. It
was the third warning since
Friday of another quake.
David Dean, deputy chief of
the U.S. mission in Peking,
said plans were being made to
have 18 wives and weight
children of mission staff
members flown out of the city
today. There were no im
mediate plans to evacuate the
31 staff members, said Dean,
reached by telephone from
Hong Kong.
It was reported in London
that the British embassy in
Peking flew out 50 dependents
yesterday. Other embassies
were doing the same.
Kyodo said N Chinese
seismologists were sum
moned to the Peking Zoo over
the weekend when some
animals began making loud
noises and became violent.
The Chinese, proficient at
predicting earthquakes, are
believed to depend on such
signs as odd animal behavior
and changes in the levels
of well water.
Millions of Peking residents
remained camped outdoors,
away from the potential
danger of falling buildings.
Kyodo said foreigners who
were remaining in Peking
were moving into tents in
embassy courtyards.
Dean said hotels and
restaurants in the city were
closed and that the mission
was encountering problems in
obtaining food.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is
to depart Wednesday for Teheran to
attend the third annual meeting of the
U.S.-Iranian Economic Commission.
The report said Nixon established
Iran’s status as U.S. arms client partly
to offset Britain’s military withdrawal
from the Persian Gulf.
“President- Nixon,” it said, “per
sonally informed the Shah during his
May, 1972, visit to Teheran that the
United States would sell either the Fl 4 or
the Fl 5 to Iran.
“A subsequent Nixon memorandum
informed the U.S. bureaucracy of this
decision and stated that, in general,
future decisions on other requests for
in the little laboratory would activate,
measuring the radioactive carbon in
the experiment’s atmosphere.
Data returned over the weekend has
shown a great deal of radioactive
material released in the experiment
more, in fact, than was released when
earthly micro-organisms were given the
nutrients in a test.
“If it is biology,” said Dr. Harold
Klein, chief of Viking’s biology team,
“microbial life, living things too small
to be seen by the naked eye on Mars, is
more intense and developed than on
earth.”
And though the data could indicate
living systems, scientists forwarded a
plethora of alternative explanations.
60 in Colorado
The new rains caused the river to rise
but survivors were safe on high ground,
authorities said. A Bureau of
Reclamation official said a dam at the
headwaters of the river should prevent
additional flooding.
A spokesman at the morgue said
bodies of the dead'were classified by sex
and apparent age. He said iden
tifications of the dead would not be made
before today.
Sheriff Watson estimated about 4,000
persons were in the canyon when heavy
rains began Saturday night. The two
lane, paved Trail--Ridge Road winds
through the canyon studded with scrub
pine, ponderosa pine and aspen, con
necting Loveland, 10 miles below the
mouth, with Rocky Mountain National
Park and the river’s headwaters near
Estes Park.
Reclamation workers shut off the
inflow to a dam outside Estes Park to
prevent further flooding as rescue teams
of sheriff’s officers and nationalguards-
Peking
' Hshinhua, the official
Chinese news agency, has not
issued any offical report of
casualties beyond saying that
Tangshan, ,a city of one
million people -near the
epicenter of the quakes 100
miles southeast of Peking,
had suffered “serious”
damage and loss of life.
Foreigners in Tangshan when
the tremors struck said it was
totally devastated.
Peking and Tietntsin, a city
of four million, also suffered
damage and casualties.
Hsinhua’s report on relief
efforts indicated that the
Chinese leadership may fear
internal political reper
cussions from the earthquake
disaster.
Funds for second
not out of general
By MIKE JOSEPH'
Collegian Copy Editor
.The $126,000 that the University spent
last week to buy its second Piper Navajo
aircraft did not come from state funds
and could not have been used to reduce
tuition increases, according to Steve
Garban, University Controller.
Garban said the $126,000 came from a
“capital funds” account and not from
the University’s general operating
budget. It is the size of the operating
budget that determines the size of
tuition, he said.
Garban described capital funds as
money that has accumulated from
donations and gifts to the University as
well as from interest gained from in
vestments the University has made.
Garban said the $126,000 could not
have been transferred from the capital
funds account to the general operating
budget because the capital funds must
be kept on hand for the purchase of
conventional weapons should be made
by the government of Iran...
“The decision not only opened the door
to large increases in sales to Iran, but
also effectively exempted sales to Iran
from the normal sales decision-making
processes in the State and Defense
Departments,” the report said.
“Insofar as is known, the May, 1972,
decision has never been, formally
reconsidered even though the large oil
price increase in 1973 enabled Iran to
order much more than anticipated in
1972.”
Congressional sources said Nixon’s
memo, dated late July, 1972, remains
classified. .
One of the favorite alternative ex
planations is that Martian soil contains
some sort of oxygen compound such
as peroxide that reacted violently
when moistened by the wet nutrient mix.
If that is the case, said Klein, life
mimicking chemical reactions would be
caused, producing essentially the same
data that living microbes would.
Further, possibly more conclusive
data was to be gathered and transmitted
by Viking 1 this week. Among the ex
periments reporting in will be the
pyrolytic light experiment, which will be
primarily searching Martian systems
that can accomplish photosynthesis, the
process by which earth plants take in
carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
men brought out survivors by trucks
and helic’opters to shelters in Loveland.
About 400 survivors who escaped
exploding propane gas tanks detonated
by floating logs in the river were taken to
the Loveland High School gymnasium
and given blankets and food.
Children played on a trampoline
unaware of the magnitude of the disas
ter. Nearby, a list of survivors was
tacked to the wall of the gymnasium,
which served as the Red Cross center.
Surviors told of a night of horror filled
with victims’ screams, gas tank ex
plosions that sounded like crashing jets,
houses hurled from one side of the
canyon to another, and bodies tossed
grotesquely into trees.
Many climbed sheer canyon walls to
cling to rattlesnake-infested rocks
during the night. .
“Literally hundreds of trucks and cars
were stranded,” Watson said. “Houses
were moved from one side of the canyon
to’another. It’s like a kid scattered a
handful of cars here and a handful of
cars there.”
At one point, 2,500 were stranded in the
canyon. All but about 300 were
evacuated by nightfall by Army
helicopters, deputies on horseback and
volunteers, rescuers said.'
Watson said he knew bodies of
unrecovered victims were swept down
the river and east into the South Platte
River which runs toward , the Kansas
border. He said “bodies went by us
Saturday night at the mouth of the
canyon but there’s nothing we can do
about it.”
The flooding was triggered by 6-10
inches of overnight rains and the river
crested at 10-15 feet—lo feet its normal
depth.
Some canyon residents who escaped
before the flood crested tried to return
and “look for their loved ones and
belongings,” said Sheriff Watson. One
Some bodies were pulled from the
river by members of the sheriff’s
mounted patrol who rode horseback
through the canyon. Patrol Sgt. Bill
Shannon said the scene .was one of
“complete devastation.
•n cants par copy
londay, August 2,1976
01. 77, No. 23 8 pagaa University Park, Pennsylvania
'ubllahed by Students ol the Pennsylvania State University
major, permanent assets such as the
Navajo. Capital funds, he said, sustain
the University’s potential for growth..
“The moment you eliminate capita'l
funds, you cannibalize yourself,”
Garban said.
The University purchased the Navajo
last Monday, trading in its more
modestly equipped Piper Aztec. The
Navajo has a seating capacity of six,
while the Aztec seated four.
In a separate interview, Assistant Vice
President for Business George Lovette
told the Collegian that the Navajo will
reduce the expense of outside charter
flights the University- must hire to
supplement service from its own air
craft.
“There were a considerable number of
times we had chartered an airplane to
get five seats,” Lovette said. “We’re
always trying to cut down on the number
of outside charters.”
Lovette said the University actually
Mail
to get
WASHINGTON (AP) The
Democrat-controlled House is
scheduled to act this week on Jimmy
Carter’s first legislative request since
he became the Democratic
presidential nominee speedy
passage of a bill to permit voter
registration by postcard.
House consideration was set for
tomorrow. Democratic leaders say
they expect both chambers to pass
the measure.
The Senate today takes up the $lO4
billion defense appropriation already
passed by .the House. The House
version contains $1 billion for three
B 1 bombers. Efforts in the House to
postpone, production of the aircraft
failed.
In the Senate an effort will be made
to bar expenditure of the B 1 funds
until next Feb. 1, when a new
president may be in office and could
review the decision to go ahead with
the bomber. Carter has said that a
decision to production of the bomber
should be made by the next ad
ministration.
Both chambers will be working
during the week on wide-ranging
Correction
Hospital confinement benefits were
available under last year’s Undergradu
ate Student Government insurance plan,
and are not a new addition to the cov
erage, as was incorrectly reported in the
July 28 Collegian.
Not quite an ark
It may not have been 40 days and nights, but the rain came down hard enough to
send these men to refuge in the doorway of the Faith United Church of Christ on
College Avenue Saturday.
operates an internal chartering service
whereby departments of the University
pay for their use of University aircraft
out of their own departmental budgets.
So instead of hiring an outside char
tering service or travel agency,
departments, in effect, hire the
University aircraft and save money,
Lovette said.
Lovette added that the conference
seating capability of the Navajo will
enable University officials to make more
efficient use of their time.
In a related matter, Lovette said that
there has been a study done to determine
whether the University should add
another full-time staff pilot to the four
who currently fly the two Navajo air
planes. But he said that he currently
sees no need for a fifth pilot.
Nor did Lovette foresee the University
soon adding to its fleet of aircraft. “I
don’t think we’re going to buy another
aircraft for a long time,” he said.
registration
House action
amendments to the Clean Air Act.
One would give the automobile in
dustry more time to work on methods
ofcontrolling harmful emissions,
postponing until the 1980 model year
the present requirement for full
compliance in 1978 models with
emission standards.
Both Senate and House versions of
the bill to amend the Clean Air Act
contain restrictions designed to
prevent any significant air quality
deterioration in areas considered
atmospherically clean. An amend
ment to eliminate these and sub
stitute a one-year study of the
subject is scheduled for a Senate vote
tomorrow.
For most of the week, the Senate
will be working also on its version of
general tax revision.
The postcard-registration bill,
which had been lingering in the House
Rules Committee, was swiftly ap
proved by a near-party-line vote in
that committee after Carter
telephoned Speaker Carl Albert last
week asking that it be pushed to
enactment.
Too cool for comfort. Partly sunny and
unseasonably cool today, high only 72.
Partly cloudy and chilly tonight, low 55.
Partly cloudy and a little warmer tomor
row with a chance of an afternoon thun
dershower, High near 76.
Navajo
budget
Weather