White House Threat Reduction Budget Stresses Energy Department Activities

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has requested a significant increase in Energy Department funding to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere next fiscal year, while keeping the Defense Department threat reduction budget flat and decreasing the State Department’s allowance (see GSN, Jan. 31).

The administration’s fiscal 2006 budget proposes an increase for Energy Department threat reduction activities from $439 million to $526 million.

Requested funding for the Defense Department’s threat reduction program also climbed from $409 million to $416 million, but the increase is actually negated when inflation is factored.

The White House is seeking $71 million for State Department threat reduction efforts, as it did for fiscal 2005, which after inflation amounts to a decrease. The Congressional Budget Office’s inflation assumption for fiscal 2005 to fiscal 2006 is 1.9 percent. The fiscal year begins in October.

The budgets for threat reduction activities in all three departments were reduced last year for fiscal 2005 (see GSN, Oct. 7, 2004).

Energy Department officials have said that they have accelerated efforts in recent years to secure nuclear weapon-usable materials in Russia and other former Soviet states, including by installing intrusion detection alarms and fences around sensitive sites.

“A number of major milestones for this cooperative program are on the near horizon and the FY 2006 budget ensures that sufficient funding will be available to meet these milestones,” according to the department’s 2006 budget document.

It cited completing security upgrades for Russian Navy nuclear sites by the end of fiscal 2006 and Russian strategic rocket force sites by the end of 2007. Work also would begin to secure nuclear warhead storage at the Russian Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate.

While the requested increase for Energy Department threat reduction programs, administered by its National Nuclear Security Administration, increases the administration’s overall threat reduction budget request from $919 million to $1.013 billion, a critic said the total still does not appropriately prioritize threat reduction.

“The administration’s new request for nonproliferation funding is disappointingly low.  After President Bush agreed during the 2004 campaign that the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists is the greatest threat to the United States, his budget fails his own test,” said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World arms control organization. 

A White House budget document explaining the threat reduction funding said, “A sprawling nuclear complex in Russia and other locations in the former Soviet Union, and vulnerable nuclear material elsewhere, remain the most likely sources for the material, technology, and expertise” needed to develop weapons that could be used for nuclear terrorism.

“The administration has targeted the nuclear terrorism challenge with aggressive nonproliferation programs that have achieved a number of major successes in recent years, including the dismantling of Libyan WMD programs and unraveling of the A.Q. Khan network,” it says

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