test_pdf.pdf

ADDRESSING
FUTURE
ARMS
CONTROL
AND SECURITY
PROBLEMS
before that, which would be a lot of hard political heavy lifting in Russia. So we need to make it enough in
Russia’s interest to motivate people to do that kind of hard political heavy lifting.
On what’s stopping things from going faster, I wish I knew. At the moment we appear to have presidents
in both countries who are genuinely concerned about terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction.
I believe that in both cases we have presidents who think that that’s probably only likely to happen if a
hostile state actually gives it to them. Therefore, the policy prescription is, take on the hostile state. Take on
Iraq as being a leading example for Bush.
That is the less likely of the possible ways that terrorists could get weapons of mass destruction. I think
the much more likely way, in the case of nuclear weapons at least, is this nuclear material that’s inadequately
secured. I think if President Bush and President Putin, (a), understood (audio break, tape change)….are
operating in good faith and they wouldn’t take the actions if they saw the opportunities available to them
and saw the urgency of the need. The agenda for us is trying to convince those two individuals or whoever
ends up in those slots in the future that this is a big threat and there’s a lot they can do about it.
MS. KELLEHER: I know there are many more questions. Richard, just a very small comment, please.
MR. SPEIER: I think your question about why not now is a very good one, and as someone who worked
for over a decade on nuclear nonproliferation before getting into missiles, the fact is that all the plans now for
getting rid of excess nuclear materials will take many, many decades—50, 70, 90 years. It’s very frustrating.
In the mid-1990s some RAND colleagues and I proposed an approach where we would take excess nuclear
material out of the U.S. and Russia and put it under international physical security custody in a third
country.
This was similar to an approach that was of interest to the Joint Staff in the early 1990s. It was written
about very favorably by Jessica Mathews in the Washington Post. She mentioned a country that we had
suggested as the repository for this material. The country suggested that they’d be interested in negotiating
it, but it never went anywhere. There are many reasons, but one is that we are now so fully committed to this
path of 50, 70, or 90 years to really get rid of this material. It’s a shame that we can’t step back and look at
much quicker ways to take this material out of harm’s way.
64
64