Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Senior Bush administration officials must work harder to encourage U.S.-Russian cooperation on securing and disposing of Russia’s massive unconventional weapons capabilities, a former Bush administration official said yesterday.

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Kuenning, who until October served as director of Cooperative Threat Reduction program at the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, made his remarks at a DTRA-cosponsored conference in Alexandria.

The program has accomplished much since its creation more than 10 years ago, he said, listing numerous destruction activities posted on the agency’s Web site.

Most recently, this week, work will be completed on a new facility for securely storing up to 100 tons of fissile material, he said. In addition, massive work has been completed to upgrade security at two key chemical weapons storage sites and operations there will begin this week, Kuenning said.

Kuenning added, though, that the program needs greater support from senior Bush administration officials, comparable to what was received in the nascent days of the program in the early 1990s.

A level of “political support and political participation” is needed, he said, akin to “the early years of this program, [where] political appointees were involved in fostering the program and pushing this program forward.”

Becoming Coercive, Rather than Cooperative

Kuenning said the U.S. approach toward the program following a reported Russian breach of one agreement has been slowing cooperation.

He cited an incident reported last year in which the United States contributed $106 million to help Russia build a plant to destroy liquid missile fuel, but later discovered the fuel instead had been used in Russia’s civilian space program (see GSN, March 4).

U.S. officials have sought to ensure that such an incident does not happen again, Kuenning said.

He said, though, “The reaction to that has been that now we’re trying to get in place for everything a written precise agreement and it is clogging up, constipating cooperation.”

“It is becoming a coercive program, rather than a cooperative program. So we need to get cooperation back into the program,” he said.

Biological Destruction

Greater political involvement is needed in particular on biological weapons destruction activities, Kuenning said.

“On the bio side, we need to have quite frankly more political involvement to develop a relationship of cooperation with Russia. … The degree of Russian cooperation is very limited,” he said.

The Soviet Union at one point had between 40 and 70 institutes dedicated to biological weapons research and 20,000 people working for the biological weapons industry, he said.

“We need to have a diplomatic agreement that allows us to work with these various agencies to accomplish security improvement at these biological sites,” he said.

“Plus, we need to have the full gamut of those sites opened up for our cooperation,” he said.

Progress has been “relatively modest” on biological activities, he said, with more than $50 million contributed annually by the United States, up from a few million dollars prior to the U.S. mail anthrax attacks in October 2001.

Current activities center on supporting projects aimed at fostering peaceful collaboration between U.S. scientists and former Soviet biological weapons laboratories.

“The bottom line is there is a lot that has to be done,” he said.