Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

WMD THREAT REDUCTION: HOW FAR HAVE WE COME

KENNETH N. LUONGO
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, RUSSIAN AMERICAN
NUCLEAR SECURITY ADVISORY COUNCIL
TESTIMONY BEFORE THE
HOUSE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EUROPE AND SUBCOMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM, NONPROLIFERATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

MAY 14, 2003

Mr. Chairmen and members of the Subcommittees, thank you for your invitation to testify today before this joint hearing of the House International Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe and Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights. I am pleased to offer my testimony on the status and future of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat reduction efforts.

I am currently Executive Director of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, RANSAC, which is a non-profit research organization dedicated to supporting cooperative nonproliferation and threat reduction efforts with Russia and the former Soviet states. RANSAC works closely with many governments, particularly the U.S., Russia, and in Europe, to develop interest in new WMD security initiatives and to ensure the timely and effective implementation of existing threat reduction programs.

I applaud the Subcommittees for holding this joint hearing. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction remains a significant, central threat to U.S. national security. The global effort to stem this threat and secure and destroy existing weapons and materials requires the high-level political attention that the Subcommittees are providing today.

Mr. Chairmen, I will summarize my formal statement, and ask that the full text of my testimony be included in the official record of the hearing.

Threat Reduction's Achievements

The cooperative threat reduction agenda created by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar and related efforts are now over a decade old and during this time they have been a critical defense against the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, materials, and knowledge from Russia and the former Soviet states. Threat reduction programs have produced significant results including: the removal of roughly 7,000 nuclear warheads from deployment; the destruction of more than 400 missile silos; elimination of more than 1,400 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, submarines, and strategic bombers; enhancement of storage and transportation of nuclear material and weapons; elimination of 150 metric tons of weapon-grade uranium; elimination of a major biological weapons production plant, and the support of approximately 50,000 chemical, biological, nuclear and missile scientists in peaceful research work. With construction of the first wing of the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility, the nuclear components from more than 12,500 dismantled nuclear weapons will be safely stored in coming years.

These significant and quantifiable accomplishments are all the more remarkable since they have been achieved under often difficult circumstances through cooperation with Russian ministries and institutes that for over forty years were our enemy.

But, beyond the concrete measurable rewards, these cooperative programs also have created equally important but less tangible benefits. These include: a better appreciation in Russia of the importance of nonproliferation; the development of deeper levels of trust between U.S. and Russian officials, military officers, and scientists; and the creation of important new political linkages and relationships not thought possible during the Cold War. These intangible benefits are hard to quantify in official reports, but they are a unique result of this work.

The recent G-8 pledge to provide up to $20 billion over the next decade, under the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, has provided an opportunity to further catalyze and accelerate progress on this nonproliferation agenda and to bring in new allies to share the threat reduction burden.

Remaining Threat Reduction Challenges

While there are impressive threat reduction results, much of this agenda remains to be completed. Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s weapons-grade material remains inadequately secure, the destruction of chemical weapons is just starting, and much remains unknown about the size and scope of Russia’s past biological weapons activities.

These problems are exacerbated by many implementation problems that have developed during the past decade. But, these problems are not technical for the most part. They are political and they can be resolved if there is the demonstrated political will to do so. Let me outline some of these key challenges.

Political Attention

Because of its sensitive nature and the need for cooperation by all parties, the threat reduction agenda requires sustained political attention and the expenditure of political capital by the U.S., Russia, and other nations. However, truly robust political support for threat reduction is very rarely demonstrated, and often is more rhetorical than real.

For example, the Russian government has not often demonstrated its overt political commitment to this agenda at high levels and has rarely spearheaded efforts to eliminate the internal security and bureaucratic problems that plague implementation in Russia. In the U.S., insufficient political support and attention has resulted in funding limitations and restrictions, bureaucratic battles, and delayed program implementation.

The G-8 Global Partnership initiative is less than a year old and progress is being made in shaping its contributions and actions. But, I have just returned from a meeting in Rome on the Global Partnership that included government officials and nongovernmental organizations. I came away with the impression that a number of issues affecting U.S. threat reduction cooperation are being replicated in the G-8 process. Insufficient facility access, difficulties in negotiating agreements, and the lack of requisite legal protections are all problems that the Global Partnership is facing. And, so far, these problems are not being addressed consistently at high political levels in any of the G-8 countries.

It is largely up to the Russian government to resolve the major impediments, but increased and high-level political intervention could eliminate a number of these problems. In my opinion, it is within the power of the U.S., Russia, and other G-8 governments to break down the real barriers to cooperation that have hamstrung the programs and to create the conditions for concrete and rapid progress if they chose to do so.

Access and Transparency

Perhaps the most pervasive impediment to progress at present is the lack of access to Russian facilities and transparency of information. Major parts of the Russian national security bureaucracy are still wary of the West and its interest in Russia’s defense materials and facilities. Requests for access and transparency create suspicion on the Russian side and the rejection of these requests fuels resentment and hard-line attitudes on the U.S. side.

In a recent study, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) confirmed the seriousness of the issue, noting that the lack of access provided by Russia to some of its WMD-related facilities has resulted in slow progress for several Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy (DOE) threat reduction efforts. In particular, the report noted that access and information transparency challenges have delayed essential security upgrades for Russian nuclear warheads, weapons-usable nuclear materials, and biological pathogens.

The disputes over access are frustrating, and ultimately it may require changes in Russian law for the matter to be completely solved. But these problems can be better managed if there was a regular and focused dialogue between high-level political leaders in both countries. Such a process does not now exist.

Strategy and Coordination

One consequence of political inattention is the lack of any integrated or comprehensive strategy for the panoply of threat reduction programs. As a result, the review and coordination of the goals and objectives of bilateral and multilateral threat reduction programs remains inadequate and overall direction and prioritization are lacking. Bipartisan and insistent calls for a dedicated threat reduction coordinator in the White House have been rejected by Democratic and Republican administrations. Creation of a coordinator position and the development of an integrated strategy could substantially improve threat reduction’s effectiveness and more quickly reduce proliferation risks. Without improvement in management and oversight, threat reduction activities will remain vulnerable to attack as delays continue to grow.

The need for strong coordination will become more essential in the future as threat reduction’s results become less tangible. To date the most popular elements of threat reduction activities have centered on highly observable developments (such as the elimination of missiles, aircraft, and submarines). Activity in these areas will continue, but other issues such as weapon scientist re-direction and weapon complex infrastructure downsizing will become more prominent in the coming decade if the roots of the proliferation danger are to be addressed. However, these issues have an uneven track record of political support, and require longer timelines for implementation and achievement of their goals.

Excess WMD Scientists

A fundamental source of instability within the former Soviet WMD complexes is economic in nature. Therefore, addressing the economic dimensions of threat reduction is essential. The downsizing of WMD production plants and related infrastructure will displace thousands of scientists and workers skilled in the details of weapon design, manufacture, and maintenance.

However, the re-employment programs currently in place for weapons scientists, while essential, are not providing many career-changing opportunities in any of the WMD complexes in Russia and the FSU. The two main strategies for the redirection of the scientists that have been pursued by governments - science research contracting and technology-driven commercialization and business development - are inadequate. New approaches and new attitudes are required to meet this challenge.

The science contracting approach has been, and remains, an essential lifeline for many weapons scientists. But the duration of most projects does not exceed three years, and many of these scientists still maintain their weapons-related employment during this time. Indeed, a recent analysis done by the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) has shown that this multilateral program, in 2001, paid about 23,000 WMD scientists to work on its projects, but that only about 600 of this total were spending more than 200 days of the year on ISTC project related work. This shows that the scientists’ skills are really not being converted completely from weapons work, but instead they mostly are being detoured temporarily. Also many of these science projects do not have relevance to clear global scientific challenges, as measured by the general lack of interest in their results, though this is changing to some degree.

At the other end of the re-employment spectrum, the efforts to create commercial enterprises for weapons scientists have had some successes. But government investments have yielded little real results often because the projects have not adequately conformed to market needs. Creating successful commercial enterprises is difficult enough in Russia because of the systemic barriers to business creation. When the additional layer of impediments that is unique to the Russian weapons complex are added, it becomes a daunting challenge.

Western governments must be willing to accept these realities and lower their expectations that commercialization in the WMD complexes will completely solve the problem of excess scientists. But, Russia must also curtail its unrealistic economic expectations and recognize that systemic problems in that country impede commercial progress.

One issue that is becoming increasingly important is to distinguish between the redirection needs of the scientists and engineers in these complexes, and the need to identify suitable non-weapons work for the production workers displaced by the complex downsizing process. A recent analysis has estimated that excess weapons production workers from Russia’s fissile material production and warhead R&D and production nuclear cities account for about 20 - 25,000, of a total of about 35,000 projected excess employees in the Russian nuclear complex. These workers have knowledge of the physical, chemical and metallurgical properties of the various weapons materials and components, and that makes them a proliferation risk.

Therefore, a more cohesive, comprehensive, integrated, and effective strategy for addressing the re-employment of scientists across the WMD spectrum needs to urgently be developed and implemented. Harnessing the experience and knowledge of the excess weapons scientists to real world problems, like environmental remediation, energy technology development, life sciences, and nonproliferation would provide global benefits as well as a path to sustainable career change for these scientists and eliminate the proliferation threat they pose.

Funding

Funding for threat reduction has been considered the litmus test of support. And, indeed, robust funding for this agenda is necessary. But, some key programs are now experiencing funding backlogs because the implementation difficulties are holding back progress. The implementation problems, in turn, are festering because of the lack of political attention to solving them. If these problems could be solved, then substantially more funding could be spent in an effort to accelerate the completion of threat reduction’s goals.

While more than $1 billion per year is being made available for international threat reduction programs by the U.S. and other nations, there are a number of efforts that could accelerate progress if additional funding was made available to them. These include re-directing weapons scientists, eliminating additional quantities of highly enriched uranium, implementing plutonium disposition, ending the production of weapon-grade plutonium, converting research reactors that currently use highly-enriched uranium (HEU), and improving border, export, and customs control.

Threat Reduction Expansion

While threat reduction is facing some very difficult challenges, its unquestioned successes have made it a candidate for expansion. During the past two years, there has been more attention focused on multilateralizing the threat reduction effort, expanding its scope beyond Russia and the FSU, and assessing its applicability to new arms control and security agreements.

The G-8 Global Partnership

Threat reduction has always been more than just a U.S.- Russian effort, and many other countries have contributed to various objectives, such as chemical weapon destruction and scientists’ redirection. But the creation of the G-8 Global Partnership was a major step forward in the multilateralization of WMD threat reduction efforts. Under this initiative, the G-8 nations committed to provide up to $20 billion to support cooperative non-proliferation projects, initially in Russia. This constitutes a major funding increase from the non-U.S. G-8 nations.

The assumption is that the U.S. would bear the cost of about half the $20 billion since it is currently spending about $1 billion per year on threat reduction activities in Russia and the FSU. Another roughly $8.5 billion has been publicly pledged by the other G-8 nations, the European Union, and a few non-G-8 nations to date. About 8% of this $8.5 billion amount has been committed to specific projects.

The major interests of the G-8 nations are in chemical weapons destruction, submarine dismantlement, plutonium disposition, and re-employment of weapons scientists. Additional areas of work will include Soviet-designed nuclear reactor safety projects and environmental remediation efforts. These are all areas that are well within the scope of the current threat reduction portfolio.

But, the substantial increase in funding and commitment to threat reduction from countries other than the U.S. has provided a framework for thinking concretely about the future and expansion of this agenda.

Regional Expansion

In the past year and a half, attention in the policy community has turned to whether and how U.S. threat reduction assistance can be extended to other countries outside of Russia and the other former Soviet republics which possess weapons of mass destruction and/or potentially vulnerable material stockpiles and weapons expertise.

Several studies on this subject have been published and a variety of ideas have been put forward as to how the United States could engage countries such as China, India, Iraq, Pakistan, and possibly even North Korea in threat reduction-type activities.

Some useful forms of nonproliferation cooperation with other countries that could be explored more intensively by the United States include:

However, a number of complications and barriers exist which could prevent effective U.S.-led activities in these nations. These include the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which limits cooperation between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states, U.S. laws and export controls, suspicions in the host country about possible assistance motives and intentions, and domestic policy attitudes which oppose any foreign assistance that is perceived as contributing to operational readiness or offensive capabilities of foreign military forces. Clearly, substantial political will must be summoned to establish meaningful threat reduction cooperation with other countries of concern.

Moreover, congressional opposition has, to date, prevailed over most proposals to extend threat reduction to other corners of the world, at least when it comes to utilizing resources of the Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program.

Twice in the past year, proposals to allow use of un-obligated Cooperative Threat Reduction program funds for nonproliferation activities outside of the former Soviet Union have been defeated in the Congress. At present, CTR is limited under existing law to cooperation with states of the former Soviet Union.

Proposals for the expansion of threat reduction beyond Russia and the FSU have been put forth by Senator Lugar, in 2002, and as part of President Bush’s wartime supplemental funding request to Congress earlier this year. Senator Lugar’s effort resulted in a compromise that requested a Department of Defense study on the authorities currently available to the U.S. government, as well as limitations, in responding to any emergency WMD proliferation threat around the world. The President’s request for threat reduction expansion was rejected as part of the final Iraq war supplemental appropriation bill, though this bill did provide $15 million to the Energy Department’s nonproliferation programs expressly for threat reduction assistance to non-FSU countries.

Applicability to New Arms Control Agreements

Threat reduction may also have a role to play in facilitating current and future arms control agreements. The implementation of the START I treaty has provided an essential rationale for a major portion of threat reduction activities, but other agreements like the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), have had the opposite effect. In particular, concerns about Russian declarations under CWC and BWC have led to prohibitions on spending U.S. funds for chemical weapons destruction and hiatuses in contracting for new activities in many WMD areas.

There is a need to clarify and harmonize the relationship between relevant arms control agreements and flagship threat reduction programs. Other agreements such as the Treaty of Moscow, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and regional nuclear weapons-free zones currently have little or no relation to threat reduction, but threat reduction could be instrumental in facilitating the implementation of these treaties. These linkages should be explored, as threat reduction cooperation between the U.S. and Russia moves through its second decade.

A Threat Reduction Reform Agenda

Many of threat reduction’s key problems can be solved if the Congress and Administration take decisive steps to expedite, reform, and expand this agenda this year. The dangers posed by insecure nuclear, chemical, and biological stockpiles remain high, and the coming presidential election could preclude the opportunity for change next year.

A threat reduction reform agenda, however, should not focus on additional expenditure restrictions and more onerous reporting requirements as a means of assuring accountability. Fiscal prudence is necessary, but these methods have produced limited results to date and reliance upon them places risk aversion over threat elimination.

Taking action on the following key policy, financial, and procedural issues this year could break the threat reduction logjam.

Conclusion

The dangers are acute. As President Bush has stated, “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. … We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. … History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”

If terrorists or hostile regimes should gain access to the world’s largest exposed WMD stockpiles because of inertia, distraction, or risk aversion on the part of our leaders, our security will suffer despite other victories in the war on terrorism, and the judgment of history may indeed be harsh.