Senate Gives Nunn-Lugar Program $80M Boost

The U.S. Senate approved a defense funding bill Thursday that would provide $80 million beyond the Bush administration’s request for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar announced (see GSN, Sept. 19).

The legislation includes a total of $428 million for the 15-year-old Nunn-Lugar program that provides funding and technical assistance for securing or eliminating weapons and materials of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union and beyond.

Lugar in April urged the Senate Armed Services Committee to allocate $100 million in additional funding to secure stores of deadly agents such anthrax, bird flu, hemorrhagic fever, plague and smallpox that could potentially end up in the wrong hands.  Lugar testified that additional funds would allow projects to begin in another seven countries.

Fiscal 2008 CTR funds include $5 million in initial money for a chemical weapons incinerator in Libya.  U.S. negotiators last year refused to cover a greater share of the project’s expenses, hindering efforts to develop a bilateral weapons disposal agreement, Lugar said in a press release (see GSN, June 12).

Libya is believed to possess 23 metric tons of mustard agent.  It also has enough chemical agent precursors to produce additional weapons, Lugar said.

To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has supported deactivation or destruction of 7,191 strategic nuclear warheads, 662 ICBMs, 615 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 456 SLBM launchers, 30 ballistic missile-capable nuclear submarines, 155 strategic bombers and 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles. 

The Cooperative Threat Reduction program has also eliminated 485 ICBM silos, closed 194 nuclear test tunnels, secured 363 train shipments of nuclear weapons, boosted security at 12 nuclear weapons storage sites, and built and equipped nine biological monitoring stations.

Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan — formerly the third, fourth and eighth largest nuclear powers — no longer possess nuclear weapons.  Nearly 58,000 former weapons scientists have been engaged in civilian work (Senator Richard Lugar release, Nov. 9).

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