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U.S. Response I: Lawmaker Calls for Fewer CTR Restrictions By Bryan Bender From the conception of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program more than 10 years ago, U.S. legislators have established conditions that recipient states must meet before they can receive U.S. support. Some of these congressionally mandated restrictions forced President George W. Bush to sign two waivers last week freeing $466 million to help destroy Russian chemical weapons and initiate other threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union (see GSN, Jan. 15). “These petty restrictions, these hurdles that have to be cleared, are wholly disproportionate to the enormity of the problem before us,” House Armed Services Committee member John Spratt (D-S.C.) told the Arms Control Association Monday. “It’s the nature of the congressional process, but this is something that the president, the administration could deal with with forthright public statements saying that this is impeding important progress that affects our national security,” Spratt said. Congressional critics, mostly Republicans in the House of Representatives, have sought to freeze some of the threat reduction funds out of concern that Russia is not spending enough of its own money on threat reduction programs and has not been fully transparent or provided adequate access to its weapons programs. Another meddlesome restriction, according to program supporters, has been the requirement to certify that Russia is fully compliant with arms control treaties before releasing all threat reduction funds. “There will be someone who wants to exact a concession,” Spratt said of his colleagues. However, “we need to make it clear to everybody that what we’re talking about is not Russia’s security, but our security,” he said. He singled out the Nuclear Cities Initiative as an example of a U.S. threat reduction program that has been held hostage by politics. The decade-old project, now called the Russian Transition Initiative, is designed to provide scientists in Moscow’s closed nuclear facilities with alternative compensation in light of Russia’s economic troubles in recent years. “These programs have never been terribly popular among my colleagues from across the aisle,” Spratt said, nor among senior Bush administration officials, who fear some of the money has been diverted. “I know from a personal engagement that [national security adviser] Condoleezza Rice was not particularly impressed with the Nuclear Cities Initiative,” he said. Funding for the effort has been reduced over the years, despite its obvious utility, in some years by almost $20 million, he said. In recent years the program has received as much as $57 million. “It’s in jeopardy of coming down even more. This is one of the areas where we should be really worried,” Spratt said. Overall, he added, the CTR program is “succeeding in spite of these impediments that we’ve laid in Congress, but we need more money. Based upon their success, we need more emphasis, and these programs deserve more credit,” Spratt said.
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