Kerry Will Target Threat of Weapons

Sen. John F. Kerry, who has struggled to lay out a distinctive policy for Iraq, will attempt this week to draw a compelling contrast with President Bush on another pressing national security issue: reducing the chance that terrorists can obtain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Kerry plans to deliver an address in Florida today outlining what advisors say is a more aggressive policy for finding, securing and destroying such weapons that could threaten the safety of the United States.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will argue that even a relatively nominal increase in the U.S.’ annual investment of less than $1 billion would reap enormous security benefits, according to experts who have been advising Kerry on the issue.

That money would be used to secure weapons and dangerous materials that often go lightly guarded in Russia and other states that made up the Soviet Union -- efforts collectively known as “cooperative threat reduction.”

The Massachusetts senator also will call for a high-level presidential appointee to lead the threat reduction push, for more police and firefighters to beef up the ranks of “first responders” to any mass attack in the U.S., and for revamped diplomacy in Iran and North Korea to slow nuclear programs in those nations.

Kerry has previously proposed significantly accelerating the time frame for securing “loose” nuclear materials that the Russians had agreed to store or eliminate. He wants those efforts accomplished within four years, instead of the 13 years projected in one recent study.

With his speech today, Kerry is pursuing a goal he has touched upon in past remarks: elevating weapons nonproliferation “to the top of the global agenda.”

Arms control advocates and Democratic strategists believe the threat reduction issue could have particular resonance with voters because of a combination of factors: uncertainty over whether the Iraq war has helped or hurt security at home, continuing reports that weapons of mass destruction remain relatively unprotected in many nations, and new warnings that terrorists may try to attack America this summer.

The Bush administration tried to slow or eliminate several cooperative arms reduction projects before Sept. 11, 2001, amid complaints that the Russians were not doing their share. But the president shifted course after the terrorist attacks.

In the summer of 2002, he pledged $10 billion over 10 years to a global partnership for rooting out weapons of mass destruction, with other Western nations committing another $10 billion.

Also under his watch, the longtime rogue state of Libya agreed to eliminate its development of nuclear weapons.

Last week, the Bush administration pushed ahead on another delayed cooperative measure. The Energy Department said it would undertake a $450-million campaign to retrieve nuclear materials that the U.S. and former Soviet Union sent to more than 100 nations for use in research reactors.

The nonproliferation subject appears to be of no small concern to many voters.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have listed “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons” as a top foreign policy concern, just below “fighting international terrorism,” according to surveys by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said Kerry’s argument that more emphasis was needed on cooperative weapons reduction could find a receptive audience. In surveys Kull has conducted, a solid majority of Americans said they thought Bush had not worked closely enough with other nations on the issue.

But Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, said it was Kerry who had a credibility problem on national security issues.

“Every time he brings up something like this to criticize something Bush has ... done, the real question is: ‘What have you been doing the last 20 years as a senator?’ ” Goeas said.

GOP political strategist Eddie Mahe Jr. questioned how big a role the threat reduction issue would play in the campaign. “I don’t think you are going to find people who are going to focus on that to make their decision about a president,” Mahe said.

Experts have been calling for years on America and other nations to work harder to eliminate weapons that could be destructive to all -- recommendations that increased after 9/11.

Toward the end of the administration of President Clinton, a bi-partisan commission co-chaired by former Republican Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee recommended that the U.S. increase its annual investment in multinational arms reduction programs from less than $1 billion a year to $3 billion. Under Bush, expenditures have remained relatively flat.

Last week, a study by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs concluded less nuclear material had been secured since Sept. 11 than in the two years before the terrorist attacks.

In addition, key programs to reduce the nuclear threat have stalled. The U.S. and Russia had agreed to eliminate 68 tons of plutonium that both stockpiled during the Cold War.

Like enriched uranium, plutonium can be used to make atomic weapons.

The program has been held up because of a disagreement between the Bush administration and Russian leaders over who should assume liability in the case of an accident or sabotage at Russian arms centers.

Many arms control advocates say the U.S. should drop its insistence that the Russians assume blanket liability, because of the urgency of removing plutonium that is vulnerable to terrorists.

Similarly, fences and electronic sensors and other “quick-fix” materials -- which could protect dozens of Russian arms sites -- have remained in warehouses while the two nations feud over how much access American contractors should have to the facilities.

The Bush administration “has spent billions looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said Paul Walker, who heads the U.S. chapter of an organization founded by former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to reduce weapons threats.

“We have been telling them we know where the weapons are. We just need the political leadership and the money and we can go get them,” Walker said.

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at the Belfer Center, said that under Bush, “You have had an almost complete lack of attention from the presidential level [on threat reduction], and so summit after summit after summit [with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin] has gone by without making any progress on these issues.”

Although he once worked on a science advisory panel in the Clinton administration, Bunn once also criticized Clinton for not doing enough to advance cooperative threat reduction.

“Both the successes and failures in this field have been completely bipartisan,” he said.

All sides agree that the effects of a terrorist attack could be fearsome: A relatively small 10-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded in central New York City would kill half a million people and cause an estimated $1 trillion in economic losses.

Against the backdrop of that threat, Kerry is expected to argue that increasing the less than $1-billion national investment in nonproliferation projects is a small price to pay when contrasted with well over $100 billion in spending in Iraq and a defense budget of $402 billion a year.

The presidential-level envoy he will propose would be responsible for better coordinating programs internally -- making sure that efforts by the departments of Defense, Energy and State do not languish -- and assuring that lines of communication with Putin are open, so that technical disputes can be resolved more quickly.

Kerry will note the increasing danger from the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs since Bush took office -- claiming that the president’s unbending stance toward North Korea had left leader Kim Jong Il believing he had to speed up the nation’s nuclear program.

Kerry will deliver his speech today in West Palm Beach, Fla., a port city, to spotlight the continuing threat of weapons delivered in shipboard containers. He will probably repeat a call for the installation of sensors in shipping containers, only 4% of which are inspected before they enter the U.S.

The candidate also is expected to criticize the administration over the findings of a General Accounting Office study, released in late April, that concluded nuclear weapon storage sites in the U.S. were vulnerable to terrorists.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham responded with a plan for security upgrades, but Kerry has called that too little, too late.

Although Kerry’s shopping list of protective measures could become expensive, he has not yet said how he would pay for the improvements.

That could be one line of response for Bush and his surrogates.

The GOP campaign also will probably argue that Bush has been leading the world’s efforts to reduce weapons of mass destruction, particularly with the 2002 agreement he helped forge with the leaders of other Western industrial nations to form the $20-billion, 10-year “global partnership” to reduce weapons of mass destruction.

Although Kerry has tried to minimize credit to Bush for the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear program, the president’s reelection team will cite that as another key victory.