The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

could have been sold or stolen.” Gottemoeller is quick to caution that we can’t “guaran- tee that every single warhead is safe and secure and will not ever fall into the wrong hands. I can’t prove a nega- tive.” But it’s still a great success story, she says. Bunn emphasizes how essential it is to sustain the effort. He tells the Journal , “If Russian and other recipient coun- tries don’t put in place the resources, organizations and incentives to maintain high security after U.S. assistance phases out, we will end up losing the large investment we’ve made. It’s an urgent threat, not just to our security, but to their security as well.” Progress on cooperative threat reduction was spurred in 2005, when President Bush and President Putin signed an agreement in Bratislava to put deadlines on the completion of certain tasks. Among those is improving security at war- head storage sites in Russia, a responsibility assigned to the NNSA. “We’ve completed work at roughly 75 percent of the sites,” says Tobey, the top nonproliferation official at that agency, and “the work is ahead of the original schedule that we set out.” Under the Bratislava Agreement, that work is supposed to be completed by the end of 2008, which coincides with the end of the Bush administration. An interesting side-note: According to Tobey, 10 per- cent of the electric power generated in the United States is fueled by former Soviet weapons. That’s half of America’s total nuclear power generation. Hecker, who helped start the DOE programs in the 1990s, says that the NNSA programs are good as far as they go—but they don’t go far enough. Those gains don’t “mean that Russian plutonium and highly enriched urani- um have a modern, comprehensive safeguards system. They’re not adequately protected in the long run.” In addition, notes Hecker, the Russian systems of “control and accounting” — i.e., keeping careful track of their nuclear materials — are still terribly inadequate. “The reactors and research facilities are very high on my list of the Russian threats.” The problem, NTI’s Holgate explains, is that the research reactors often contain highly enriched uranium, which is the ideal raw material for amateur bombmakers. It can be easily handled and worked with, and it can be assembled into a “gun-type” nuclear device, the design for which is robust and relatively well understood. Lower Priority for Russian Nukes? After 15 years of progress in cooperative threat reduc- tion work with Russia, the counterproliferation experts and pursestring holders are getting ready to move on to the next big challenge. Lugar (until January the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) has been very protective of the program that bears his name, and now he is looking to expand its scope. In 2004, the law was changed to permit Nunn-Lugar programs to operate outside the former Soviet Union, though that provision has gone almost unused. And Lugar announced in February that he would ask for $100 million in Fiscal Year 2008 to respond to the threat of biological weapons. He also sponsored a bill that passed in 2006 to stop the proliferation of conventional weapons, such as shoulder-fired missiles, worldwide. But on the administration side, the FY 2008 budget requests for nonproliferation programs at the three main WMD counterproliferation agencies — DOE, DOD and State — are all down from 2007 requests, by 5 to 19 per- cent. These datapoints may well mean that the heyday of Nunn-Lugar is coming to a close. Perhaps all the low-hang- ing nukes have been picked, and some key players have decided it’s time to declare victory and go home. The remaining tasks — and there are plenty —would be left to the Putin regime and its successors, which hopefully can be trusted to take care of Russia’s own security needs. Perhaps that’s OK. Hecker, a veteran observer of the proliferation scene, today counts Russia as the number- four proliferation threat in the world — after Pakistan, North Korea and HEU reactors around the world. “Russia is still very high on my list,” he said, “but it’s not the highest.” F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 What’s Been Accomplished So Far • More than 6,900 nuclear warheads deactivated • More than 600 intercontinental ballistic missiles dismantled • 30 nuclear submarines destroyed • 83 percent of Russian facilities storing weapons-usable fissile materials received security upgrades • 285 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from dismantled nuclear weapons blended down to non-weapons-usable low- enriched uranium • More than 4,000 former Soviet weapons scientists redirected toward sustainable and peaceful work Credit: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2007 study, “25 Steps to Prevent Nu- clear Terror: A Guide for Policymakers”