Lugar, Nunn Call for START Extension While Reviewing CTR

By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and former Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) last week called on the United States and Russia to renew key provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to lapse in December 2009 (GSN, July 23).

The two men traveled to Russia to mark the 15th anniversary of their landmark Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation to secure weapons of mass destruction in former Soviet nations and beyond. 

They voiced concern that the Bush administration might view treaty extension as unnecessary.  Russia has expressed interest in striking a new agreement but the White House has been less than enthusiastic.

Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Aug. 28 that he is “inclined to feel we probably do” need to extend the accord’s verification and transparency provisions.  Now co-chairman and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, Nunn called extension of the 1991 treaty “absolutely essential.”

“The United States and Russia must extend the START treaty’s verification and transparency elements, which will expire in 2009,” Lugar said in Moscow.  Additionally, “they should work to add verification measures to the Moscow Treaty,” he said.

That 2002 accord, signed by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, commits the United States and Russia to reducing their stockpiles of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to no more than 2,200 by 2012 (see GSN, March 7).

Lugar also proposed that the two former Cold War rivals employ procedures similar to those used in the CTR program for dismantling weapons in North Korea if a pact is concluded to eliminate weapons of mass destruction there.

For his part, Nunn urged the Bush administration to back off plans to deploy a missile defense system in Europe, which Russia opposes (see GSN, Aug. 24).  The United States and Russia should “pause” and “take a deep breath,” Nunn said, or the two nations would risk a “stumble to the precipice of strategic danger.”

The former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman also said the United States and Russia should do more to take their nuclear arsenals off hair-trigger alert and should take deeper cuts in their stockpiles.

Nunn additionally called for bilateral talks on the future disposition of short-range nuclear weapons and on making research on biological weapons more transparent.

Lauding the success of the so-called Nunn-Lugar legislation, which launched the threat reduction effort in 1992, a key Russian nuclear energy figure noted no major leakage of nuclear components or materials has occurred over the past 15 years in nations where the program has been operating.

Work remains to be done, though, said Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of Russia’s atomic energy agency, Rosatom.

“The horizons of our cooperation are breathtaking and there are a lot of problems,” he said at an Aug. 28 round-table discussion with U.S. and Russian government officials, experts, diplomats and military officials.  The Carnegie Moscow Center and the Center for Policy Studies-Russia sponsored the event to celebrate the Cooperative Threat Reduction anniversary (see GSN, Aug. 24)

On Aug. 29, President Bush released a statement commemorating the legislation, noting that 75 percent of Russian warhead sites and 160 buildings containing weapon-grade nuclear material have been secured.

“As the threat continues to evolve elsewhere, U.S. [threat reduction] efforts are expanding to include the work of securing dangerous biological pathogens, rapidly detecting disease outbreaks, and improving export controls and border security to stop the movement of materials of mass destruction worldwide,” Bush said.

Nunn and Lugar’s travels last week took them to a number of CTR sites, among them the Luch nuclear institute in Podolsk, Russia.  There they witnessed the arrival of 21 pounds of uranium from a research reactor in Otwock, Poland, which had been secretly shipped for conversion for nuclear power plant fuel, the Washington Post reported Aug. 30 (see GSN, Aug. 10, 2006).

One of the first post-Soviet uranium thefts occurred at the Luch facility in 1992, when an employee stole roughly 1.5 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium.

The United States has since helped “secure nuclear material and consolidate highly enriched uranium storage from 50 areas in 17 buildings to five areas within four buildings — an effort that significantly reduced the risk and security costs,” according to a statement released last week by the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Nunn and Lugar also visited a chemical weapons disposal facility at Shchuchye, where construction is just beyond the halfway point after years of controversy over contracting and funding. 

Russia might begin destroying chemical weapons there by the end of next year.  However, it could take another five to 10 years to destroy the facility’s 1.9 million artillery shells filled with sarin, soman and VX nerve agents.

“I don’t think we have that much time,” said Nunn, who expressed concern that the shells could pose an attractive target to terrorists.

Once built, the Shchuchye facility would be capable of destroying 1,700 tons of chemical agent each year.  Under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia has until 2012 to destroy its arsenal (see GSN, March 1).

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]

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