test_pdf.pdf

ADDRESSING
FUTURE
ARMS
CONTROL
AND SECURITY
PROBLEMS
wonder if you could say a bit more about that. And what would work particularly if we continue to retain nuclear
weapons deployed in Europe as part of NATO.
MS. KELLEHER: I wonder if I could use the privilege of the chair also to include General Habiger also, since
he also made a point of this in his comments.
MR. BUNN: Well, first on the tactical nuclear weapons. First of all, we ought to focus on the most dangerous
weapons. To my mind, the big distinction is not between tactical and strategic. The big distinction is, is it equipped
with something that’s going to make it extremely, extremely difficult for somebody who doesn’t have help from
within that weapons program to figure out how to set that sucker up, or is it not? So all the ones that still exist,
where the answer to that is, you know, no, we only have an old cruddy lock on this that would be relatively
easily bypassed if they had intelligent people working on it. Those, in my judgment, are basically too dangerous
to be allowed to exist.
If you allowed each side essentially to choose which weapons were going to be put in these monitored
stocks, the U.S. would probably [choose] subtacticals but a good chunk of strategics that we don’t really need
any more. On the Russian side it might be mainly tacticals. But you want to have each side make at least an
unverified commitment that all the weapons that raise this concern would be in this category. So you put
them in the storage sites that already exist, but you have areas of those storage sites that would then be open
to monitors from the other side so people could come, look, see that they’re there, count how many are there,
observe the security arrangements as Gen. Habiger did at one site in Russia years ago—actually a couple, if
memory serves.
That would be a very immense improvement in our security; just getting them under essentially jointly
monitored lock and key. Then the next step would be committing that they be verifiably dismantled. If we had
then eliminated this problem of those weapons that are too dangerous to be allowed to exist, we could then
go to other states and say, “if you have anything like that, you ought to dismantle it as well.” Or many
countries, like Pakistan for example, are believed to store the individual components separately. I would
argue that’s just as good as the kinds of electronic locks that we do. So it seems to me a relatively simple and
fairly compelling initiative.
There is an amazing place about an hour and a half drive out of Moscow called the Institute of Physics
and Power Engineering, in a town called Obninsk. They have 75,000 disks made of either weapon-grade
highly-enriched uranium or plutonium, and if it were plutonium, about 80 or 100 of them would be enough
for a bomb. You can put about 20 of them at a shot in your pocket.
When we first started the cooperative effort with Russia, none of these had any labels on them. There
was no detector at the door of the building where they were stored to set off an alarm if somebody were
carrying them out in their briefcase or in their pocket or what-have-you. There wasn’t much of a fence around
the overall facility. Now every single one of them has a bar code, although technology being what it is and
people messing things up the way they do, now all the bar codes are rubbing off and now we’re having a big
problem with trying to figure out what kind of new bar codes should be put on them.
They’re all stored in a big vault. I don’t recommend visiting that particular vault. It’s hot as a pistol in
there. I remember when I visited it, they said, we really ought to give you the briefing while we’re still
standing outside the vault door because as soon as they opened the vault door, their little radiation meter just
pegged right over into the red zone.
But let me just tell you a distressing story about that, which to me sort of sums up safety culture at
Russian facilities, security culture, and also the amazing degree of sexism in the Russian nuclear establishment.
I was visiting this particular facility and getting a tour of the new security arrangements that we
helped install and I noticed as we were going in toward the vault that we had to pass through not one but two
of these nuclear material detectors in the hallway. I said, get out of here. What’s the story? Why do you need
two nuclear detectors? One of them had American company markings on it, the other had the Cyrillic markings
from a Russian company.
They said the building next door makes medical isotopes. Every Thursday they do the chemical separations
to separate out the isotopes they actually want from all the radioactive junk that they end up making in
the reactor when they irradiate the stuff to make the isotope. So much radioactivity goes right up the stack
that the American-made monitor goes up in this building next door. He said, it shrieks like a woman every
Thursday. So they turn off the American monitor on Thursdays and rely on the less sensitive Russian
monitor.
Of course, every insider at that facility knows which day of the week the American monitor is turned off.
62
62