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Significant Hurdles Remain to U.S.-Russian Nuclear Security, Report States By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — Bureaucratic and political impediments continue to frustrate U.S.-Russian efforts to secure vulnerable weapon-usable nuclear materials, top experts said here today as they released a new report on preventing nuclear terrorism (see GSN, April 21). Stronger presidential leadership is needed in both countries to overcome disagreements over site access, liability and other concerns, according to two Harvard University experts and former Senator Sam Nunn, now the chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Nunn praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush for calling, at a summit this year in Bratislava, for better cooperation on safeguarding Russia’s nuclear stockpile and for joint global leadership on nuclear security. Nunn added, however, that the countries are “doing too little and moving much too slowly.” “I think the issue is sustained, focused leadership at the presidential level,” Nunn said. Bush and Putin made progress in Bratislava, Nunn said, but “they did not remove the obstacles” relating to liability concerns, site access and Group of Eight threat reduction funding — the “unfinished agenda” of the summit, he said. Nunn expressed hope that the Bush-Putin meeting next week in Russia could yield such progress. In their report commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Harvard’s Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier note, as examples of progress over the past year, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540 on WMD security, the U.S. Energy Department’s launch of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative and the Bush-Putin summit in February. “Translating last year’s pledges into the needed rapid action,” they write, “will require sustained leadership from both President Bush and President Putin and from the leaders of other key nuclear states.” To maintain focus on the effort, they say, Bush should appoint a senior-level official to work solely on nuclear security and should be consistently available to the official in order to make needed decisions. “Action from the highest levels is needed because difficult bureaucratic and political impediments persist that cut across agencies and departments and cannot be resolved by officials within any one agency,” write the authors. “Success will require not just occasional encouraging statements but in-depth, day-to-day engagement.” The researchers call on Washington to pursue an “accelerated and strengthened partnership with Russia” to replace cooperation that is faltering and asymmetrical. “To achieve both the top-level Russian commitment necessary to move nuclear security cooperation forward and the working-level Russian ‘buy-in’ essential to ensure that upgraded security systems will be sustained and improved over time, a shift from a donor-recipient relationship toward a true partnership will be essential,” according to the report. “In a real partnership, Russia would have to contribute more of its own resources, and the United States would have to pursue a truly joint approach, with Russian and U.S. experts involved in all stages of the conception, design, implementation and evaluation of these programs.” Making such a shift, Nunn said repeatedly, would require the two countries to “change the psychology” of their relationship, including through Russian access to U.S. nuclear sites and Russian participation in designing the security and threat reduction programs. As for the Russians, he said, “They’ve got to step up not only with more funding themselves, but they’ve got to take on a global role.” In addition to U.S.-Russian liability and access disagreements, the “unfinished agenda” to which Nunn referred included Group of Eight threat-reduction funding. “Nearly three years ago,” Nunn said, “the G-8 pledged to match U.S. Nunn-Lugar funding, but this G-8 effort is making glacial progress and needs focused leadership” (see GSN, Jan. 28). Bunn said Russia and the United States should strive to obtain support from other countries by emphasizing the urgency of the problem, which he said is illustrated by continuing terrorist attacks around the globe and by al-Qaeda’s known desire to acquire a nuclear capability. “The threat is urgent, and therefore so is the need for action,” Bunn said. Wier presented the pair’s analysis of U.S. funding for threat-reduction programs and progress at Russian sites. The Bush administration’s fiscal 2006 budget request for the programs, although a 22-percent increase at $982 million, is still too little, Wier said. In particular, he said the Global Threat Reduction Initiative could use more money. “Most programs are limited more by the level of cooperation that has been achieved with potential recipient states than by money,” the authors write, “but there are several areas where small increases in available funds could accelerate progress.” “Probably the best available indicator” of progress in Russia, they say, is the percentage of buildings containing weapon-usable material that have undergone U.S.-funded security upgrades, which stands at 56 percent. The buildings figure corresponds to just 26 percent of weapon-usable nuclear material at Russian sites, however, and the researchers said a “dramatic acceleration” would be needed to bring the second figure to the U.S. Energy Department’s goal of 100 percent by 2008. [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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