test_pdf.pdf

ADDRESSING
FUTURE
ARMS
CONTROL
AND SECURITY
PROBLEMS
facility. There’s not, by the way, very much highly enriched uranium there so let’s not get too excited about that
particular reactor. But at a lot of others there are. In Libya, there is a Soviet-supplied research reactor with enough
essentially fresh highly enriched uranium for a bomb sitting at their facility. It’s my understanding that material
is going to be removed as part of the deal with Libya.
There are issues around the world. Pakistan remains a very high concern from my perspective, not because
security is low. We believe that there is pretty heavy guards for that stockpile, but because the threat is extraordinarily
high. Both the insider threat, as is now unfolding in our newspapers on an essentially daily basis, the
degree to which insiders in their nuclear establishment have been, either for personal gain or for Islamic fervor, or
the combination, spreading this kind of technology. But also the outsider threat, since you have heavily armed
remnants of al Qaeda. If you’re going to have 41 heavily armed guys attacking the middle of Moscow, imagine
how many people might attack without warning at a Pakistani nuclear weapons storage facility.
So do terrorists want nuclear weapons? Yes. Bin Laden has said so. The Chechens are carrying out these
reconnaissance at nuclear warhead storage sites. Is it conceivable they could make a crude bomb? Yes, as Senator
Biden said. Is there material that might be vulnerable to them? Yes. Is it likely that if they had a crude device they
could smuggle it into Moscow or into Washington or into New York? Yes, unfortunately so.
We did a study that came out a year ago, which was available out on the table. I gather all of them are gone
now. It’s available on the Worldwide Web at the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Web site—it’s Controlling Nuclear
Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan. We looked at the terrorist pathway to the bomb. We tried to
lay out the steps terrorists would have to take to get from first deciding to pursue nuclear violence to actually
detonating a weapon in the United States, and then the various things the government might be able to do to
address those, ranging from threat reduction to the global war on terrorism to homeland security.
The bottom line is that the weak point for the terrorists, the hard point for the terrorists, and the most costeffective
place for us to act is in securing this material in the first place. Once it gets out of wherever it’s supposed
to be, finding it and getting it back again, or stopping it from coming into our country becomes a very, very difficult
problem. So as Senator Biden was saying, the fundamental issue is we’ve got to lock down every nuclear weapon,
every kilogram of nuclear material that could be used to make a nuclear weapon wherever it is. Much has been
done to do that over the last decade or so. The Russians were taking quite a number of steps themselves, although
generally in their case it’s been add more guards. Add more guards is good if the outsider threat is the main threat.
If the insider threat, somebody carrying something out in their briefcase, is the main threat than whether there is
one guy saying, “have a good weekend” to Ivan as he’s walking out, or whether there’s five guys saying that, it
really doesn’t make any difference.
U.S.-Russian cooperation has improved security for hundreds of tons of nuclear material and thousands of
nuclear warheads at dozens of sites. Enough bomb material for thousands of nuclear weapons has been permanently
destroyed. Many of you may not know that half of all the fuel we use in our nuclear reactors in this country
today comes from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons. They dismantled the weapons, they take the highly
enriched uranium from the weapon, they blend it to low enriched uranium that can never be used in a nuclear
bomb again. They ship it over here and we use it as fuel in our nuclear reactors, and it’s all done on a more or less
commercial basis so it basically doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment, but we
ought to be doing it faster.
We’ve also removed, with the Russians, and with the IAEA some nuclear material from some particularly
vulnerable sites. A lot of people have worked hard. But the reality is that much more remains to be done than has
been done so far. As of the end of last fiscal year, only 23 percent of the potentially vulnerable nuclear weapons
that had had comprehensive security and accounting upgrades installed with U.S. assistance. Less than half had
even had the first round of what are called rapid upgrades, things like bricking over windows that you could pass
material out through, or piling a big block in front of the door, that kind of thing, completed.
Now if you look at the number of sites where those have been completed, the numbers look better because a
lot of the sort of little sites with small amounts of material were done first, and that was probably a good thing
because I think those were some of the most vulnerable places. But the pace simply doesn’t match the threat.
Secretary Abraham announced with great fanfare last year that they had secured 35 tons of nuclear material that
year. Well, that’s six percent of the material. If you kept going at that rate, it would be 13 years to get done.
There are impediments that run across departments, and as Senator Biden said, you really need sustained
presidential action. We know how to do this. The technology is very straightforward. The issue is the politics and
the bureaucracy. In part, because these issues are very sensitive. Convincing the Pakistanis to let anybody, let
alone us, come to their nuclear sites and help improve security at those sites is a very difficult sell. Convincing the
Russians has been a very difficult sell over the last decade because the threat those security systems at Russian
sites were designed to deal with was not a terrorist threat originally. They didn’t expect terrorists running around
53
53