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U.S.-Russia: Nunn, Lugar Say Nuclear Proliferation Should be U.S. Top Priority By David Ruppe “We are calling for an acceleration and reprioritization of U.S. threat reduction programs to ensure that the most urgent threats are addressed first,” said Lugar, who with Nunn in the early 1990s authored a law that created the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction, or “Nunn-Lugar,” program. That effort provides aid to secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction and their core materials in the former Soviet Union. The Energy Department also conducts similar programs to secure former Soviet nuclear materials. “At some point we’ve got to take this seriously as a nation,” Lugar said. Lugar and Nunn called on President George W. Bush to designate one person responsible for developing and coordinating a national strategy to prevent nuclear proliferation and urged that it become the administration’s top foreign policy priority (see GSN, Feb. 12). “Sam Nunn and I at every iteration of Nunn-Lugar called for one person, one administration person, or barring that the National Security Council head, to take up this problem in a comprehensive way on the basis that it is the most important foreign security problem. That has yet to occur, whether it was the Clinton administration or the Bush administration,” Lugar said. “I think this report underlines that the president has to offer that leadership, and really he has got to get somebody, if he is not going to take it on personally, to be the chief honcho over this,” Lugar said. The Harvard report, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan, was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private foundation headed by Nunn. Caution on War With Iraq Addressing the current Iraqi crisis, the senators did not directly criticize the administration’s focus on disarming Iraq, including a possible war. Nunn warned, however, that starting a war against Iraq without Russian and other support through a U.N. Security Council resolution, as the Bush administration has threatened, could damage international cooperation on securing nuclear materials globally. “It takes a global effort to basically address all of these problems. You’ve got to get cooperation from Russia, otherwise your biggest stockpile of this material is not going to be properly secured,” he said. “Whatever we do in the various battles has to fit into an overall strategy. What we do in Iraq, what we do in North Korea, has an effect on our cooperation, not only in this arena but in dealing with terrorism in general,” Nunn said. Lugar echoed Nunn’s comments, saying, “The total threat here has got to be the bottom line of our foreign policy.” To prevent nuclear proliferation, Bush needs to apply the same extraordinary attention as he currently devotes to Iraq, said Matthew Bunn, a report author and a senior research associate at Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom. More Attention Needed According to a “scorecard” published by the Pentagon, the Nunn-Lugar program has helped deactivate more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, as well as hundreds of ICBMs, silos, launchers, bombers and other equipment, and helped improve security at facilities and storage sites. The scorecard says, however, that after 10 years the program has completed less than half of its goals. Furthermore, it has made little headway in getting Russia to account for and fully secure its tens of tons of weapon-grade plutonium and hundreds of tons of highly enriched uranium. The Harvard report argues that the scope and pace of the program has been insufficient for addressing the nuclear proliferation problem. “Across a very wide range of potential metrics, much less than half of the job has been accomplished,” said Bunn. “While the president and senior officials of his administration, including Secretary of Energy [Spencer] Abraham, have worked hard to accelerate these efforts, that rate remains painfully slow — slower than it needs to be to have a good chance of winning the race to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists,” he said. The report provides a list of steps terrorists would probably follow to acquire, prepare and detonate a nuclear weapon or fissile material. It also describes how threat reduction programs and law enforcement and emergency teams could intervene to prevent catastrophe by acting at certain “chokepoints.” Ideally, Bunn said, threat reduction activities could prevent terrorists from acquiring the material in the first place. “The actual theft of a nuclear weapon or nuclear material [is] the hardest thing for the terrorists to do, the easiest thing for us to block,” he said. The report says al-Qaeda terrorists have been trying to obtain bomb-making materials for 10 years and said Russian officials believe terrorists have reconnoitered Russian nuclear weapons four times since 2001, twice at storage sites and twice on transport trains. It says that by last October, only 37 percent of potentially vulnerable weapon-grade fissile material in Russia was protected by security upgrades. Plan Needed Report Said The report provides a new analysis of the consequences of a hypothetical 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon detonated mid-day in Manhattan, projecting that such a weapon would kill 500,000 people immediately, wound hundreds of thousands of additional victims and cause more than $1 trillion in direct economic costs. “These facts lead immediately to an inescapable conclusion: The United States and its partners must do everything in their power to ensure that every nuclear weapon, and ever kilogram of HEU [highly enriched uranium] and plutonium, wherever it may be in the world, is secure and accounted for, to stringent standards,” the report says. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group, Inc.]
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