Source: Carnegie
Testimony Before the House Subcommittee on Europe and the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Human Rights
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, it is an honor to appear before you to testify on the issue of cooperative threat reduction in the former Soviet Union. This is my first opportunity to testify before a committee of the U.S. Congress and as such, I would ask your permission to take a moment of your time for a personal remark.
My father, Leon Brook Wolfsthal, came to this country after having survived almost 2 years of Nazi enslavement in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. He was liberated by U.S. troops while en route to the extermination camp at Auschwitz and later moved to the United States. He came to this country in the hopes of ensuring his children never had to face the horrors and brutal persecution he and his family had suffered. Moreover, he raised his children to appreciate the freedom in which they were raised and with a desire to give something back to the land that had accepted him and given him a new life.
Although my father died in 1985, I know the pride he would have felt at his son being given the opportunity to testify before a Committee of the Congress of the United States. I consider my comments to you only a small payment on a large debt that can never be fully repaid. It is a tribute to our country that in one generation our family has gone from immigrant holocaust survivor to expert witness before a congressional committee. I want to thank you for that opportunity.
With that introduction, I can think of no subject more important to the security and future safety of our country, its citizens or indeed the entire world than the one you has asked us to address today. I grew up in the waning years of the cold war and the nuclear standoff that defined 50 years of superpower relations. All who lived in those times are glad that the nuclear confrontation has been left behind us, hopefully never to return. But in our rush to leave the cold war, the general public has all too quickly lost sight of the destructive power of weapons of mass destruction - particularly nuclear weapons - and the consequences the use of even one, let alone the tens of thousands that remain in existence, would bring.
My testimony on cooperative threat reduction in Russia today will cover three main areas:
- What we have accomplished to date and why it is not enough;
- Prospects for the G-8 Global Partnership; and
- What we need to do now to make faster progress.
In a field filled with overstatements, exaggerations and superlatives, it is impossible to overstate the dangers posed by the continued lack of security over the weapons complex of the former Soviet Union. Each day hundreds of tons of materials and an unknown number of nuclear weapons - capable of killing millions of American citizens - are at risk of theft or diversion. More explosive power is at risk today than the amount used in all the wars in all of mankind's recorded history.
The loss of one nuclear weapon or 20 pounds of nuclear material could change the course of human history and inflict human suffering never before seen in the United States. Yet enough weapons and material are at risk for the nightmare scenario to unfold without warning a thousand times over. This insecurity threatens not only us, but also our friends and allies around the globe.
When I am asked why the worst has not already taken place, I have only two responses: First, we've done a lot to try and prevent it from happening and second, we've been very lucky.
Our goals for efforts in Russian nuclear complex are clear. I have described these goals in a chapter contributed to the Center for Strategic and International Studies' report, "Protecting Against the Spread of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons: An Action Agenda for the Global Partnership." U.S. nuclear security efforts in Russia are designed to:
- Establish a secure nuclear complex;
- Create a sustainable security culture for nuclear materials and technology; and
- Reduce the scope of the fissile material problem.
We have made some progress in all three areas, but not enough.
Let me even more direct. These weapons, materials and know how remain at risk - ten years after the problem was diagnosed and first addressed - because the international community, including most prominently the United States has lacked the political will and commitment to make the investments required to solve these problems quickly enough. Americans live in imminent danger of a nuclear terror because we simply have not done enough to solve this problem. For its part, the U.S. public itself has failed to understand or internalize the magnitude of the threat and demand the appropriate responses from their elected leaders.
We as a country, Republican and Democrat alike, have not applied the resources - financial and political - commensurate with the threat and we have not made these issues the bilateral priority with Russia and other states they need to be to achieve faster rates of success. This is not to say that all delays we have experienced are due to U.S. actions or inaction. Russia has not provided its full support for these programs, nor have our allies who are equally threatened by the dangers that remain in the former Soviet weapons complex. But we are the country that has the most to lose and the most to gain here; it is the United States that must move more vigorously to ensure our interests and security are protected.
Some of our efforts have been delayed because U.S. laws on issues such as intellectual property rights or procurement conflict with the most efficient ways to address specific problems and requesting legislative changes has been considered too hard. Others are slowed by congressional restrictions on CTR efforts or agendas in other areas. Still other efforts are delayed by bureaucratic infighting or competing bureaucratic priorities within and between departments. These delays should be unacceptable to people entrusted with the security of the United States, but used as a motive to push these programs more vigorously not curtail or constrain them as has all too often been the case.
As grim as the assessment is, things could have been much worse. Only through the foresight of the United States Congress and the combined leadership of Republican and Democratic administrations has the security situation in the Former Soviet Union improved. And it has improved. The wise expenditure of over 5 billion dollars has paid dividends in spades. The Cooperative Threat Reduction score sheet shows over 6000 weapons have been decommissioned, over 1000 missiles, submarines and bombers have been destroyed and enough uranium for 7000 nuclear weapons diluted and sold as peaceful power reactor fuel. Security over thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of weapons-grade and usable materials has been improved and over 40,000 former nuclear, chemical and biological and missile scientists have been peacefully engaged and employed. Other programs have secured vulnerable stocks of weapons-materials in Kazakhstan and Georgia.
Yet despite our progress to date, much remains to be done. A recent study, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan, by Mathew Bunn, Anthony Weir and John Holdren at Harvard University and funded by the Nuclear Threat Initiative reports that only "37% of the potentially vulnerable nuclear materials in Russia was protected by initial 'rapid' upgrades, and less than one-sixth of Russia's stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) has been destroyed." Progress has been slowed for many reasons, but during my five years within the Department of Energy, one of the biggest slowing factors was a lack of personnel and being forced to work under existing or recurring hiring freezes. Efforts by Congress to control spending within the department as a whole led directly to cutbacks in hiring and personnel support. These problems continued into the current administration, and have only recently shown some signs of easing. However, nuclear security efforts are still being traded off against less critical priorities within the government, and this is one reason why we have yet to make the progress needed.
That more money, personnel or political support is needed is hardly news. The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board - SEAB - chaired by former Senate Majority Leader and current Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler -- recommended in 2001 that the Department of Energy's budget for Russian security work alone should increase to $3 billion a year for the next decade. The executive summary of the report stated the matter as clearly as possible. "The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home."
What was true before the terror attacks of September 11 is even more so today, and yet we see the DOE program budget stands at roughly the same level that existed before 9/11 and before the Baker/Cutler report was issued. While anyone who has worked in or near government understands the difficult tradeoffs that must be made in budgetary matters, the level of funding for these programs simply doesn't correspond to the threat we face. Let me offer a contrast. The risk that Saddam Hussein might develop one nuclear weapon and give it to a terrorists group was deemed a great enough threat to risk US troops and expend at least $80 Billion (the size of the supplemental funding package approved by Congress). Over the past ten years, we have spent less than one-tenth that amount to secure thousands of nuclear weapons we know exist and that could even more easily end up in the hands of terror groups.
This testimony is not meant to imply that success or failure of these programs is only a matter of money spent. It is not. We have learned over a decade of threat reduction efforts that to make progress, the administration must invest political as well as financial capitol. The relationship between Presidents Bush and Putin offers both countries an opportunity to make great strides in threat reduction and nuclear security. Unfortunately, by our words and our deeds, the United States has failed to make these issues a top priority in our relationship with Russia. In cooperating on the war on terror, we must communicate at every level, including the very top, that securing Russian weapons and eliminating Russia's potential as a terrorist source for weapons is our top mission.
The progress we have made in Russia and the former Soviet Union to date has been directly tied to the arms control agreements signed in the 1990s followed up by sustained personal diplomacy from the top. Let us not forget that due to our combined arms control and CTR efforts, we completely removed nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. To give you a sense of the scope of this accomplishment, North Korea would need to operate all of its current and planned nuclear facility for 60 years to produce the number of weapons removed from these three countries.
Russia's commitment to accept dismantlement of many weapon systems and to secure and even eliminate some of the nuclear weapons released by those agreements has been linked to the legal implementation of the START I and other arms control agreements. We should be concerned that with the Treaty of Moscow, the legal basis for Russia's implementation of some CTR programs is undermined, and at the very least promising areas for cooperation are left un-addressed. I offer the example of concerns over tactical nuclear weapons in Russia, which have been cited by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld directly. The United States previously sought to establish a non-strategic nuclear weapon transparency regime, which would include details on how many such weapons existed. Such an effort was envisioned under the 1997 Helsinki statement but was never implemented. But whether under one name or another, a legal basis for transparency and control over sub-strategic weapons would be helpful is addressing this gaping security issue. This issue has been raised by the Bush administration in its efforts with Russia, to the detriment of progress in this important area. If progress is to be made in this field, it will require direct presidential leadership.
New Initiatives
The G-8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction launched in June 2002 is a good start to reinvigorating these programs. Since the initiative was announced in Canada, however, President Bush and Putin have failed to personally engage on this issue with any effect. Moreover, there are clear signs that the administration's displeasure with France's stand over the war with Iraq is undermining cooperative efforts with France. France chairs this year's G-8 summit and is tasked with coordinating the nuts and bolts of this initiative. Already, it is clear that the first year of the G-8 project will be a disappointment in real terms. Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf told this committee last week that over $6 billion had been pledged from within and even outside the G-8, and this is an important step, but pledges are not programs, and accounting is not action.
Moreover, while I applaud and support the administration's success in pursuing this initiative, I am concerned by two factors. First, the 10 plus 10 over 10 ($10 billion from the United States, $10 billion from the other G-8 partners, spent over 10 years) has quickly developed into a ceiling for our spending goals. Baker/Cutler talked about $3 billion for DOE efforts alone, and the current view is that the U.S. will spend less than a third of that this year in total. In addition, the language of the G-8 target spoke of up to $10 billion a year coming from other states, suggesting, too, that this a top target, not a first pledge. This is not an encouraging sign for what must be a growth area. Second, the G-8 initiative set the right tone by establishing the principle that other G-8 partners would enjoy the protections and experience gained over the past ten years in the United States. I am concerned that at the working level, this is not the case. I have been personally approached by foreign governments asking my help in connecting with experts in our Defense and Energy Departments in order to evaluate or establish programs in Russia. While I am glad to help personally facilitate contacts, it is clear that even now the real experts in the field need to engage one another to ensure that the greatest efficiency can be gained from their collaboration. Beyond the top political commitments, this may be a critical issue to the initial success or failure of the G-8 initiative and thus far, progress on making these intergovernmental connections has been poor.
Next Steps
In assessing that needs to be done, my views are heavily influenced by the collaborative work the Carnegie Endowment has done with the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council. We had the great pleasure to work with RANSAC on a ten-month project to examine the current status and future prospects for threat reduction efforts. Our process was to hold what amounted to a series of hearings on the full range of CTR issues. Our findings were published in November 2002 in the report "Reshaping U.S.-Russian Threat Reduction: New Approaches for the Second Decade." The report includes 11 key findings:
- Threat reduction cooperation between the United States, Russia, and other FSU states-and the activities funded by European states and the G-8-are important in preventing the proliferation of WMD and in strengthening security and political relations among these nations, but much of the agenda remains uncompleted.
- Political support for threat reduction activities is not sufficiently deep in the United States, Russia, and Europe. High-level and consistent political support added to the expenditure of political capital are essential for real progress to be maintained on the threat reduction agenda.
- Threat reduction lacks a coordinated and understandable strategy.
- Many pressing future threat reduction programs will focus on activities with more intangible results than those of the past decade.
- Financing for some key threat reduction activities is inadequate.
- Financing is not the only impediment to progress.
- Access to facilities and transparency of information are essential.
- Economics and threat reduction are inextricably linked but not well integrated, and the connection is not well understood.
- Re-employment programs for scientists generally are not working well in any of the WMD complexes.
- The relationship between arms control agreements and threat reduction needs to be better defined.
- There is a need to expand threat reduction to include new activities. Threat reduction already covers a wide range of activities, but there are additional areas where it could be expanded: attack submarine dismantlement; warhead dismantlement; export and border control; cooperation on early warning; missile de-targeting and de-alerting; and ways to induce the United States and Russia to begin discussions of their sub-strategic nuclear weapons.
Our past efforts show that the United States can make significant and even quick progress in reducing the proliferation risk from the former Soviet Union's weapons complex when we make a high level and sustained commitment in terms of prestige and financing. This effort must be communicated and followed up from the very highest levels, including between the presidents. Moreover, to be successful, the efforts must be clearly communicated to, understood and supported by the Congress to ensure funding, oversight and to avoid political hurdles which have routinely hampered the implementation of some security efforts.
In the near term, I am concerned about three major issues:
1) the United States Government is not organized for success;
2) The G-8 Global Partnership cannot fail; and
3) The unexpected.
1) This past year has witnessed an amazing bureaucratic shakeup within the United States Government. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security was mirrored within the United States Congress by the establishment of specific committees to oversee this department and the wide variety of programs that affect our national security. Such a move, however, has not been replicated in the field of threat reduction to the detriment of the implementation of these programs and to their congressional oversight. I have never had the benefit of working for the Congress, but having seen the world from the other side of town, I can assure you that the multiple layers of oversight, hearings, reporting requirements, funding and day to day requests for information have exacted a negative cost on these programs. Let me be clear, I think these programs require effective congressional oversight as a means to ensure maximum efficiency and to generate the broadest possible understanding and support for these efforts from the U.S. Congress. But this oversight needs to be as efficient and coordinated as we demand of the programs themselves. Moreover, I continue to believe that a central coordinator in the White House with direct responsibility and authority for the full range of our threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union is a critical requirement for ensuring the future success of these programs. The current system of interagency coordination, and the one that proceeded it, simply does not ensure the most efficient use of taxpayer money or the strongest possible implementation of U.S. policy. Moreover, it does not fully protect U.S. citizens from the threats posed by these issues.
2) The Global Partnership within the G-8 is a major step toward ensuring that the United States and the rest of the world shares in the burden of dealing with the cold war's overhang in the former Soviet Union. Moreover, it is a critical path forward for ensuring that Russia can move from the position of a pure recipient of assistance to a broader force for nuclear security and non-proliferation around the world. Russia is a vast country with tremendous assets to offer in the global effort to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and the G-8 initiative is the first step in a process for Russia to resume its traditional role in non-proliferation efforts. But these efforts are in serious danger of faltering. The Evian summit is less than one month away. The stated target of pledges has not yet been met, new programs are not in place and major allies are still harboring grudges over the positions taken prior to the war with Iraq. The outlook is grim. The President himself can and must change the tone and the outlook for the summit. Personal relationships matter, and for the sake of the Global Partnership and for the security for Americans that its successful implementation would bring, President Bush should reach out to his French and German counterparts and demonstrate that their commitment in this area will go a long way to repairing the rift that has opened between the long-time allies. This effort will not in itself repair the overall alliance, but taken as part of a broadly based plan to reengage with our traditional allies on mutual issues of concern, the G-8 program could make a valuable contribution. Together, the three leaders can take a personal role in ensuring that not only are financial targets met, but that every leader in every county sees the success of this initiatives as in his or her direct interest and responsibility. To raise the bar on these efforts, the President should challenge his G-8 partners to invest more money more quickly, and do so by pledging to invest three dollars for every one invested by the other states. Moreover, he should pledge to spend five for every dollar spent by Russia itself. In doing so, the President should also make the personal commitment in prestige and time to work directly with these countries and these programs to ensure they receive sustained high level attention.
3) Every morning, I read the headlines and am thankful that they do not read "NUCLEAR WEAPONS EXPLODES IN XXXXXX." I cannot tell you that such a terrible thing will happen if we do not do more, but I can tell you that the risks of it happening increase every day we do not do everything we can. If and when such a terrible event does occur, all of our elected officials will be asked - why didn't we do more? Why didn't we staff our projects with thousands of people, instead of a few hundred? Why did we spend less than one-quarter of one percent of our annual defense budget on this obviously high priority? We will all be affected, and we will all be responsible. But few of us who work on these issues will be shocked. This is not a surprise hijacking, but a slow moving train that may have already left the station. We have the means to stop it if we choose to.
One last point. There is the perception in Washington and particularly in the Congress that the broader public does not support these programs and see them as foreign aid or charity. I can tell you from personal and sustained experience that this is not the case. When they are given the facts, average Americans sees these programs for what they are - a critical investment in our security. Yes, they want to see our allies and even Russia itself do more, but in the end, they know we must make the investment if no one else can or will. We should all strive to see these programs in the same light, as a critical part of our national defense. Money spent in this area does not come at the expense of our defense budget or other security efforts, but are a critical part of the same. Their success is not a Republican or Democratic issue, but an American issue, which deserve our full support and continued efforts.
