Arms Control: A New Generation

The Cold War is over. The United States and the Soviet Union are no longer poised to blast each other and the rest of the planet out of existence.

That doesn’t mean the world’s a safer place.

“Unfortunately, that traditional threat has been replaced by many new and--in many ways--more frightening dangers,” said weapons expert William Potter, head of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Poorly guarded nuclear weapons and fuel in the former Soviet Union are vulnerable to theft, potentially falling into the hands of terrorists or nations shopping for a military edge. Lethal chemical and biological agents can be produced nearly anywhere.

Potter and the center he founded nine years ago--now the world’s largest nongovernment body dedicated to arms control--fight that danger with specialists, an exhaustive collection of data and instruction to train the next generation of experts.

The center is a valuable resource for the United States, foreign countries, the United Nations and other international agencies. It regularly sounds alerts about inadequate storage or theft of nuclear materials and attempts at sabotage.

Its experts, including former diplomats and military officers, often are asked to brief government arms control teams after overseas trips or to testify before Congress.

“I’m one of their fans,” said Gloria Duffy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, who oversaw the U.S. effort to help the former Soviet Union dismantle nuclear weapons. She now sits on the center’s advisory board.

Education is a key part of the center, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a private graduate school with about 750 students and emphasis on business, language and government. The institute is the only U.S. college offering formal academic focus on arms control.

“We regard it as our overarching mission [to train] the next generation of nonproliferation specialists, both in the United States and abroad,” Potter said.

Part of the training is working on CNS’s vast databases, the key to the center’s operations.

While intelligence organizations focus on classified material, Potter, his colleagues and students pursue “open sources,” or nonclassified information.

Speaking dozens of languages, from Arabic to Uzbek, they scour newspapers from all over the world. They pore over trade and company publications. They look for facts and clues about the movement of legal and illegal nuclear weapons, weapons components, fuel and missiles.

A lot of the information seems inconsequential on its own--figures on uranium production, changes in export regulations, late wage payments for power plant workers in the former Soviet Union--but together it hints of possible trouble.

This research makes up 90% to 95% of the center’s information, Potter says. Other sources include former students, visiting professionals and contacts from foreign governments, private industry or another arms-control organization, passing on data from conferences, companies or arms bazaars.

Potter started the center in the mid-1980s, when he was a professor and Soviet specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. At the time, the government wasn’t taking advantage of new computer technology to monitor trade in weapons and told him they lacked the resources to do so.

Today, most subscribers to the databases are U.S. and foreign government agencies. Nongovernment bodies also rely on CNS; the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq use the databases as their primary source of nongovernment information.

Duffy recalled several instances when CNS warnings led to specific projects to eliminate the problems. In one case, Potter told her about unsecured storage of fuel rods used to power Russian nuclear submarines. She told Russian authorities, prompting an investigation and U.S. assistance in safeguarding such material.

After their studies, the center’s students go on to work for U.S. and foreign governments, helping to administer weapons-reduction programs. Others are analysts for intelligence agencies or private think tanks. Some become inspectors for the U.N. and other international groups.