Trove of Russian Arms at Risk

Eleven years after the United States committed to helping the former Soviet Union secure and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, and 14 months after President Bush made it a priority to keep them out of terrorists’ hands, vast and lethal stockpiles remain ripe for plucking, officials and nonproliferation experts say.

Although Bush and other world leaders have become ardent about the need to secure stockpiles and crack down on proliferators, implementation is snarled in bureaucratic and political wrangling in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Japan, arms control experts say.

As a result, even while the U.S. talks about a dangerous new arms race -- between terrorists determined to get weapons of mass destruction and governments desperate to stop them -- progress on taking deadly material out of circulation is slow and sometimes stymied.

And the proliferation threat, U.S. officials say, is getting worse, not better. Potential buyers are believed to include Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who has said it is the duty of Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons.

Last week’s terrorist attacks in Kenya underscore the proliferation threat from Soviet-made weapons. The shoulder-fired missile that just missed an Israeli passenger jet appears to have been Soviet-made, and Al Qaeda is believed to have fired several more surface-to-air missiles at American targets in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the last several years.

If U.S. lawmakers of both major parties are frustrated by the delays in securing or destroying the former Soviet Union’s arsenals, arms control advocates are apoplectic. Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to Washington this spring to urge Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to move faster, before disaster strikes. Even billionaire investor Warren Buffett has weighed in, paying millions to do what the U.S. government cannot.

A small number of conservative House members and Pentagon hard-liners who are suspicious of Russian intentions have put key nonproliferation programs in handcuffs.

The issue has caused divisions among Republicans in Congress. During recent Senate hearings, the gentlemanly Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), in a rare breach of protocol, began to name names. He blamed California Rep. Duncan Hunter of Alpine and Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania for blocking funding of anti-proliferation programs.

Hunter did not return repeated telephone calls to his office. Weldon, in a telephone interview, insisted that he supports nonproliferation programs and would be willing to spend more if the money did not come out of the U.S. defense budget.

But sources say that behind closed doors, Weldon, Hunter and other conservatives on the House Armed Services Committee have for years sabotaged the programs by attaching numerous conditions that are all but impossible for the Russians to fulfill.

Opponents say every dollar given to the Russians to destroy obsolete weapons is a dollar freed up for them to use for other military spending. They also have raised concerns that disarmament funds are used to solve environmental problems that are not security threats.

Arms control experts and congressional sources say that in the waning days of the 107th Congress, Hunter and his allies hobbled a program to build a plant in Shchuchye in southern Russia to destroy about 45,000 tons of nerve gas stored in decaying canisters that are poorly guarded and small enough to be stashed in a briefcase.

And they killed a budget item that would have allowed the Bush administration to use up to $50 million of nonproliferation funds to secure nuclear materials outside the former Soviet Union, which is not permitted under existing U.S. law. The idea was to help nations such as Pakistan and Yugoslavia safeguard or destroy old nuclear reactor fuel or other weapons materiel that could be blown up, stolen by terrorists, or smuggled out by corrupt insiders and sold on the international black market.

“Today, there is Russian-origin weapons-grade usable uranium sitting in North Korea, supplied by the Soviet Union,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a former Energy Department nonproliferation expert now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If Kim Jong Il himself called up President Bush and said, ‘Here, come take it,’ there would be no money available under U.S. law to come and get it.”

“We can bomb it, but we can’t acquire it,” said Andrew Fisher, spokesman for Lugar.

Lugar, who with former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) spearheaded the program to dismantle Soviet weapons programs more than a decade ago, will be taking over from Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January. Lugar has said protecting America from weapons of mass destruction will be his top priority.

Polls indicate the American public feels that the spread of nuclear weapons is the most serious global problem.

The U.S. has already committed $10 billion for the job of eliminating the weapons. And in June, the other seven industrialized nations of the Group of 8 jointly pledged another $10 billion over the next 10 years. In the last 11 years, the U.S. has spent $7 billion and the other nations have spent a total of $1 billion, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of State for nonproliferation, told Biden’s committee in October. Details of how the G-8 money will be spent are still being worked out.

At the October hearing, Lugar and Biden were bursting with bipartisan frustration. Biden wondered aloud why some of the lawmakers willing to give Bush the maximum leeway in using military force to wipe out Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction were unwilling to spend far less on peaceful cooperation with the Russians to make sure their treasure trove of weapons cannot be stolen or sold to Iraq or terrorists.

Lugar fumed to Bolton about the inability to get money freed up to start construction of a plant to destroy the nerve gas in Shchuchye, where the U.S. has already spent $250 million.

Lugar noted that he had taken pictures of some of the 1.9 million shells stored there, which are easily portable, filled with sarin and VX nerve gas, and each capable of killing about 85,000 people if set off in a stadium.

In a public acknowledgment of the divisions among Republicans, Lugar pleaded with Bolton, known as a conservative, to prod the White House to lobby the Republican opponents.

“The president was under the impression, when Sen. Biden and I met with him in July, that things are on track,” Lugar said. “But they are not on track.”

A senior Bush administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, would not say whether the White House had lobbied conservatives on the issue. The official noted only that the president’s support was well known.

In the end, Congress funded Shchuchye for one year. That means that construction can begin, but the money will run out next September, when the project will have to run the political gantlet for funding again.

Weldon insisted that he broke the logjam by persuading other House members to accept the compromise so that the plant could go ahead.

The 1991 Nunn-Lugar legislation first authorized the use of American money to dismantle Soviet nuclear warheads. In the last 11 years, the legislation has morphed into a host of complex “threat-reduction programs” run by the departments of Energy, State and Defense.

The joint U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction, or CTR, program boasts real accomplishments, including the destruction of 6,000 nuclear warheads, 400 missile silos and 1,400 missiles; the elimination of weapons-grade uranium; the securing of nuclear materials; and the reemployment of former Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons scientists.

In May, Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin agreed that their countries should do everything possible to prevent proliferation. But in practice, Russian secrecy, U.S. congressional restrictions and the ideological hangover from the Cold War continue to cause problems.

Some mid-level Russian bureaucrats continue to thwart Putin’s agenda, U.S. officials and arms control experts say. Bolton noted, for example, that the Japanese have approved money to dismantle old Russian nuclear submarines, but that Russian officials have blocked access to the shipyards where the subs would be taken apart. As a result, the project has been stalled for years.

“No one in Russia ever got fired for saying, ‘No,’ ” said Laura Holgate, vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private nonproliferation group founded by Nunn and funded by entertainment mogul Ted Turner and a $2.5-million contribution from Buffett.

Thus major new problems have developed in the last decade, concludes a report released last month by a group of top U.S., Russian and European nonproliferation specialists.

“Roughly half of the nuclear weapons-grade material in Russia remains inadequately secure, the destruction of chemical weapons is just starting and much remains unknown about past biological weapons activities,” concludes the report by the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council and the Carnegie Endowment. “Truly robust political support for threat reduction is very rarely demonstrated and often is more rhetorical than real.”

The Shchuchye project, seen in Russia and the U.S. as an important test for chemical weapons disposal programs, has become a case in point.

The weapons storage site remains a “potential Wal-Mart for terrorists,” said Paul F. Walker, a former congressional staffer now working for Global Green USA, the American arm of an environmental and disarmament group founded by Gorbachev.

Walker first visited the 80 ramshackle buildings at Shchuchye in 1994 and found them so poorly guarded that “a Boy Scout troop could have walked in any time [to steal the weapons]. And the worst of it was, no one would have ever known.”

“That was eight years ago,” Walker noted. “It is astounding to me that we have spun our wheels for eight years.”

Though security has since been somewhat improved at U.S. taxpayer expense, Walker said, Shchuchye is in a remote, wooded area near the border of Kazakhstan, near Central Asia, and is what arms control experts call “highly proliferation prone.”

In addition to the 85-millimeter nerve gas shells, the Shchuchye site holds 800 chemical-filled warheads for Scud missiles, some with cluster bomb-style dispersion mechanisms that would cause maximum casualties to civilians, he said.

“It’s a perfect target for Al Qaeda,” Walker said.

Russian news agencies have reported arrests of attempted infiltrators, but no details have been released, Walker added. If there has been pilferage from the site, no one may ever know, because no pre-1994 inventory has been found of the 45,000 or so tons of chemical weapons stored there.

The senior administration official brushed off criticism about the delays, saying the disarmament programs are complex and thorny but are moving forward. The official would not discuss whether Bush, fresh from his midterm election triumph, will use his political muscle to push his arms control agenda, or risk irking his conservative base by sweetening rewards for Russia’s compliance.

But if Bush’s stated goal of securing weapons of mass destruction is to be realized, more leadership, more bureaucratic muscle and more incentives for the countries holding the arsenals will be required, said Holgate.

Some Americans will balk at using tax dollars to help sometimes unsavory or secretive governments get rid of hideous weapons or nuclear reactor waste that they should dispose of themselves.

But to use that as justification for inaction is to indulge an idealism America can no longer afford, Holgate argued.

“That’s a very lovely moral high ground from which we may get nuked,” she said.