U.S.-Russia I:  Senate Restores Nunn-Lugar Funding

By Kerry Boyd

Global Security Newswire

The U.S. Senate added $46 million to funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program this weekend, overriding a cut made by the Appropriations Committee and restoring the program to the funding level requested by the Bush administration.  The program provides assistance to dismantle and secure former Soviet facilities and weapons of mass destruction.

In an amendment offered by Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the Senate restored the funding as part of the fiscal 2002 Defense Appropriations Act.  The appropriations bill will now go to a House-Senate conference.  The House of Representatives approved its version of the bill Nov. 28.

Restoring the funds was “clearly the right thing to do,” said Steve LaMontagne of the Council for a Livable World Education Fund.  “It’s an important program for responding to the threats posed by terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and it’s a step back in the right direction.  Hopefully these programs will be expanded and refined and better funded in 2003.”

If approved by Congress and the president, the $46 million amendment would bring the total funding for the program in fiscal 2002 to $403 million, less than the $443 million budget for fiscal 2001, according to LaMontagne, who added the measure was unlikely to face serious opposition in the House-Senate conference.

The Senate Appropriations Committee had originally recommended a $46 million reduction from the program due to “important delays which have led to large unobligated balances,” according to the Appropriations Committee report.  “Total unobligated balances available to the Cooperative Threat Reduction program exceed $700,000,000,” the report said.

Unspent balances—funds allocated in the previous year that had not been spent—are in the nature of programs that involve contracting overseas, said Jon Wolfsthal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  The United States employs contractors abroad and pays them after their work is completed, so unspent balances do not necessarily indicate a lack of activity, he said, adding that the committee’s cuts in the program were “irresponsible,” given the threat of terrorism.

$226 Million Added for DOE Nonproliferation Programs in Russia

The Senate also included $226 million for Energy Department nonproliferation programs in Russia in its $20 billion emergency supplemental bill attached to the defense appropriations bill (see related GSN story, today). 

The funds were approved after the Senate rejected a proposal by Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) to add $286 million for Energy nonproliferation programs in Russia to the defense appropriations bill.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction program has so far helped separate 5,700 Russian nuclear warheads from missiles; dismantled many warheads and safely stored the fissile material; collected and stored over 30,000 tactical nuclear weapons and provided peaceful employment for thousands of Russian nuclear scientists (see GSN, Nov. 19), Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said in a Washington Post editorial yesterday.  Lugar suggested the United States should expand the Nunn-Lugar program to other countries where possible.

The program could also play a key role in implementing potential agreements between Russia and the United States to reduce their nuclear stockpiles (see GSN, Nov. 14), so Congress and the White House should actually expand the program in anticipation of its future role, LaMontagne said.

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U.S.-Russia II:  Nuclear Reductions Near Codification

A U.S.-Russian agreement on reducing nuclear weapons is “just about done,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday en route to Moscow for meetings today with Russian President Vladimir Putin (see GSN, Nov. 28).

“All we have to do is hear a number from them and then talk through the verification and other issues,” Powell said, referring to Russia’s announced intention to indicate the number of nuclear weapons that it plans to reduce.

In November, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that the United States would reduce to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed strategic warheads in the next 10 years (see GSN, Nov. 14).  At that time, Bush expressed reluctance to codify the announced reductions, but said, “if we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I’ll be glad to do that.”

Yesterday, a senior U.S. State Department official said, “we’re willing to do this in written form,” but added, “not necessarily a treaty.”

The agreement would probably include measures established in the first and second Strategic Arms Reduction treaties, administration officials said.  “What we don’t want to lose is the verification and notifications and other provisions of START I and some of the provisions of START II,” Powell said yesterday.  “What we will be discussing is how to bring these features forward and to codify them, formalize them [in] a document in a way that both sides find satisfactory” (Alan Sipress, Washington Post, Dec. 10).

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Smuggling:  Uranium in Bust Not Weapon-Grade

The uranium seized during the arrest of six Russian would-be smugglers was not weapon-grade, officials said Saturday (see GSN, Dec. 7).

“As far as we know, it is not weapons-grade, not highly enriched uranium,” said Russian Atomic Ministry spokesman Yuri Bespalko.  The uranium is only “tablets of nuclear fuel not more than 4 percent enriched,” Bespalko said.  “It is not dangerous for humans.”  Uranium must be 80 percent enriched before it can be used in a nuclear weapon, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There was “no evidence” that a terrorist group was trying to buy the uranium, said Interior Ministry spokesman Oleg Yelnikov.   He said that the attempted sale, for a price of $30,000, was amateurish.  “If this had been the sale of material for nuclear weapons… it would have cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars,” Yelnikov said (Jeanne Whalen, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10).

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Pakistan:  Suspicion Falls on Two Scientists

Suleiman Asad and Mohammed Ali Mukhtar, two Pakistani scientists with experience working at secret nuclear facilities, have emerged as the latest focus in investigations into the possibility that Pakistani scientists assisted al-Qaeda or the Taliban in developing weapons of mass destruction capability, according to yesterday’s New York Times. 

The United States has asked Pakistani authorities to question Asad and Mukhtar, according to Pakistani reports.  The two scientists were unavailable for questioning, Pakistani officials said, because they were working on a research project in Myanmar and were not expected to return in the near future.  A spokesman said Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission did not want to interrupt the scientists’ work.  Other reports said that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had asked Myanmar to provide temporary asylum to the two scientists after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States (see GSN, Nov. 26).

In the last several weeks, Pakistani authorities have questioned several scientists, including two nuclear scientists—Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid—concerning their contacts with al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders (see GSN, Dec. 6).  None of the scientists had experience producing actual nuclear weapons, said U.S. officials.  Without such knowledge, they were not likely to have been useful to potential terrorists.  “If [al-Qaeda] had been handed the plans for a nuclear bomb, the worst they could have done is use them as kindling to start a fire,” said a U.S. official.

One of the two scientists, however, said during interrogation that he knew a Pakistani who had close contact with the Taliban, and U.S. officials thought the man was a weapons expert who was assisting the Taliban, said a U.S. official  (David Sanger, New York Times, Dec. 9).

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China: Nuclear Weapon Development Continues

China has been conducting nuclear weapon-related tests in recent months at its Lop Nur nuclear test site, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, the Washington Times reported Friday.  The tests are part of China’s effort to develop warheads for new ballistic missiles based on land and on submarines (see GSN, Nov.13), according to the Times.

The most recent test, in November, produced no detectable nuclear yield or blast, according to officials.  China conducted three additional tests in June and July, according to classified intelligence reports in July (Gertz/Scarborough, Washington Times, Dec. 7).

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North Korea:  U.S. Should Get Tough, Experts Say

The United States needs to take a tougher approach with North Korea in regard to nuclear inspections, wrote Henry Sokolski and Victor Gilinsky in today’s National Review Online.

North Korea’s recent decision to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit a nuclear research facility is a minor effort at best, according to Sokolski, the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, and Gilinsky, an energy consultant and former U.S. nuclear regulatory commissioner.

“Never mind that the facility is so benign and minor it does not require international nuclear inspections—or that Pyongyang is allowing it only to be ‘visited’ rather than examined,” they said.

Sokolski and Gilinsky praised U.S. President George W. Bush for cracking down on the North on the issue of nuclear inspections.  This is especially vital now, because the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) is preparing to start construction on two nuclear power plants in North Korea, they said.

The North cannot get the essential nuclear equipment, however, until the IAEA can make sure North Korea is no longer attempting to build nuclear weapons.  The inspection process is expected to take at least three years after full access is allowed to North Korea’s nuclear sites, according to the IAEA.  “In other words, North Korea needs to open up to IAEA inspectors now to comply with the 1994 [nuclear power plant] deal,” the authors said. 

North Korea “will come into full compliance” with the IAEA when a “substantial portion” of the reactor deal is finished—the point the project is now expected to reach in three years.  North Korea argues with this definition, saying instead that “substantial portion” is defined only as when they have to talk about inspections.  “That doesn’t sound like the response of someone with nothing to hide,” Sokolski and Gilinsky wrote.

North Korea’s refusal to comply with IAEA inspections also brings it into violation of the deal it signed with KEDO, which stated that all parties to the reactors’ construction must abide the inspection requirements in the 1994 deal.  “KEDO’s way around this has been simply to ignore the requirement,” Sokolski and Gilinsky wrote, “and hope nobody notices.”

“All this suggests the need for a tougher approach to securing North Korea’s compliance with its Nonproliferation Treaty requirements,” wrote Sokolski and Gilinsky.  “What’s needed—and what President Bush is now calling for—is far more than what Pyongyang is offering” (Sokolski/Gilinsky, National Review, Dec. 10).

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