$7b effort to disarm ex-Soviet WMDs slows
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004
WASHINGTON -- Twelve years after the collapse of the Soviet Union left weapons of mass destruction scattered throughout Russia and its breakaway republics, most of the fallen empire's vast arsenal remains intact and dangerously underprotected, according to new military data compiled over the past year.
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While the United States has spent more than $7 billion to remove all nuclear warheads from three former Soviet republics -- Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus -- and has destroyed hundreds of missiles, the task remains less than half done. Defense Department figures show that fewer than half of the 13,300 warheads slated for deactivation had been destroyed by the end of 2003, with prospects for finishing the task stretching out more than a decade.
On Jan. 27, Matthew Bunn of Harvard's Managing the Atom Project told the Senate that less than half of 600 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium is even minimally secure. The rest is protected by as little as a rusting fence and a guard, and it will take 13 years to secure it at the current pace, he said.
Almost none of the Soviet 40,000-ton chemical weapons stockpile, much in shells that could fit inside a suitcase, has been destroyed.
Security specialists say disposing of these weapons is the best chance to prevent a more catastrophic follow-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They are calling on the Bush administration to resolve serious bureaucratic delays in the United States and Russia that are hampering efforts to secure dangerous materials.
With Al Qaeda seeking nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, intelligence specialists believe that the risk that stray Soviet material could be used against US citizens has increased since the end of the Cold War -- yet political will to reduce the threat has stagnated.
Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who co-sponsored the first program to bring the materials under control with then-Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, said President Bush was initially skeptical about keeping the program but has since "indicated his enthusiasm and commitment." Still, Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would welcome a more urgent push from the White House.
"I would appreciate it if the president . . . mentioned the Nunn-Lugar program continuously," he said. "It does not have the same topicality of new initiatives that the president has come up with. It's a program that goes on, like a brook, and the dilemma really is to stimulate the rank-and-file in the Congress, many of whom were not there at the end of the Cold War and many of whom have not been involved in going to Russia."
Graham Allison, an assistant secretary of defense while Bill Clinton was president, said neither Clinton nor Bush gave these efforts the priority they deserve, though he faulted Bush in particular for neglecting the program at the same time he has stressed the danger of weapons of mass destruction falling into terrorist hands.
Allison cited a case of equipment purchased to upgrade nuclear storage facilities that sat in a warehouse for five years due to disputes over access and whether the United States or Russia would pay to install it.
"There are problems that have been allowed to fester for years," he said. "That doesn't happen if you're taking these things seriously -- which isn't to say that the people at the working level trying to get the job done aren't taking it seriously. There's only so much they can do without sustained leadership at the highest levels."
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed that characterization. The official noted that Bush asked G-8 nations to match $10 billion in planned US spending and won authorization to waive requirements delaying construction of a Siberian chemical weapons disposal plant.
"I think our record is a terrific one," the official said.
But security specialists say bureaucratic snags have gone unresolved while the White House focused on other matters.
"At this point I'm making my role literally each year and each month to try to work to find where the obstacles are -- on the authorization level, on the appropriation level, if someone in the administration may have had second thoughts on the second or third tier below the secretary -- and elevate that to the attention of the president," Lugar said.
Interviews with numerous nonproliferation specialists, including Laura Holgate of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is devoted to bringing the former Soviet arsenal under control, revealed five consistent problems:
Russian officials have blocked access to key sites -- a problem that might be resolved by emphatically bringing it to President Vladimir Putin's attention.
No single official is responsible for the success of the threat reduction effort, whose programs are dispersed between three departments and susceptible to turf wars.
Visa difficulties have delayed key meetings between US and Russian officials.
A dispute over whether Russia must completely shield the United States from liability in the unlikely event of sabotage by a US official has killed programs that dispose of plutonium and retrain nuclear technicians to keep them from selling their skills on the black market.
Members of the House Armed Services Committee have attached strings to certain provisions and delayed the release of funds for key programs.
In 2001, a task force cochaired by Howard Baker, former Republican senator from Tennessee, and Lloyd Cutler, counsel in the Clinton White House, found that an additional $30 billion was needed just to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.
"It really boggles my mind that there could be 40,000 nuclear weapons, or maybe 80,000 in the former Soviet Union, poorly controlled and poorly stored, and that the world is not in a near-state of hysteria about the danger," Baker told Congress at the time.
Still, the United States spends only about $1 billion a year to secure not just nuclear, but also chemical and biological, weapons inside the former Soviet Union. Last year, Congress authorized some of those funds to be spent outside the former Soviet Union without giving additional money. Other G-8 nations have pledged to match the US effort, but much of the money has yet to materialize.
In 1991, Lugar and Nunn got about $400 million to start the program in the Defense Department. A few years later, that was augmented by related programs in the Energy and State departments. Funding has stayed flat since.
"Because of political gridlock, that's been the number ever since, but there's no logic to it," said Ashton Carter, another former Clinton-era assistant secretary of defense. "There's a lot more we could do in Russia, and if we had a larger program on offer they might be more forthcoming."
If better funded, he added, the program could also secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and dismantle Libya's equipment.
In Bush's 2005 budget proposal, funding dipped slightly from 2004 levels, according to an analysis by the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council.
"This is a status quo budget," said the council's executive director, Kenneth Luongo. "It is not aggressive in attacking the real and mounting global nuclear threat. The Bush administration needs to focus on eliminating the impediments that are debilitating this agenda, preventing rapid progress, and impeding fresh and needed initiatives."
Democratic presidential candidates have used the issue to claim that the Bush administration has not done all it could prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, despite its rhetoric before the Iraq war.
Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts says "the Bush administration underfunds our efforts to secure and dismantle nuclear weapons." Senator John Edwards of North Carolina calls for "devoting the maximum amount of resources necessary." Retired General Wesley K. Clark promises to "greatly accelerate" efforts. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean would triple the funding.
Said Lugar: "To the extent that Democrats are able to do this successfully, I would say, `More power to you and I hope you will if you get the opportunity to govern.' "
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