nonproliferation programs, then cut the program budgets back before it even began the review. The review itself stopped action in its tracks. Travel was halted. Work was postponed. Momentum was lost. And program managers felt they lacked the authority to go forward. The review was undertaken without even the courtesy of telling our partners in Russia. Now we are told the review is complete, but we have not seen its outcome. I strongly support a review of our nonproliferation programs. We have not had one since 1993. But it needs to be broad and it needs to be strategic. The review that was recently completed appeared to be aimed merely at finding inefficiencies in individual program activities. That is a worthy purpose in its own terms, but it is no substitute for strategic thinking about U.S. national security goals and how threat reduction programs can help achieve them. I worked for many years in many capacities, first at the Department of Defense in the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, then at the Department of Energy, and now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, to implement and advance these programs to prevent nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons from falling into the wrong hands. It is my view that these programs are critically important, largely effective, and because of the obvious urgency, more in need than ever of high-level attention, increased funding, greater staffing, and continuous fresh thinking to help speed up the pace and widen the scope of these programs. If terrorists are racing to acquire weapons of mass destruction, we ought to be racing to stop them. Ten years after the passage of the landmark Nunn-Lugar Act to establish the legal basis of nonproliferation cooperation with Russia and other former Soviet States, U.S. Government activities in this area approach $1 billion annually and involve multiple agencies from Defense to Health and Human Services, myriad contractors, and over a dozen Congressional committees and subcommittees. This growth has been, by and large, organic, with each agency pursuing its own contacts and relationships in recipient countries, assembling and justifying its own budget, implementing programs based on its own culture and approaches, and interacting with its own Congressional oversight committees. This is a complex task. Some point to the involvement of so many agencies as evidence of poor management. It is not. It is evidence that such a program requires wide-ranging expertise and, therefore, will always be a challenge to administer, a challenge that can be fully met, in my view, only with high-level leadership and coordination. This leadership and coordination has been hard to come by since the early days of these programs. Where it has worked well, it has been a consequence of personalities, committees, or commissions that are not enduring features of the organizational structure, either within the U.S. Government or in relations between the United States and states of the former Soviet Union. Coordination with nongovernmental organizations like mine also occurs primarily ad hoc, based on personal relationships and our own initiative. Relationships with other countries working in these areas tends to be intermittent and opportunistic. Despite the complexity of these nonproliferation cooperation ac program implementation is, in general, very effective. In spite of proceeding without a comprehensive and coordinated vision administered from the top, these programs taken collectively have massively improved U.S. national security. Improving the coordination and accountability of these programs should result in even greater improvements. What is missing in the process is a definitive statement of strategy and consistent advocacy of administration goals. This must include holding agencies accountable for financing and implementing programs that accomplish these goals. Without this clear high-level direction and the interagency process that creates and maintains it, agencies have set and articulated their own priorities, resources have not always been aligned with those priorities, even within agencies, and differences among agencies' rhetoric and programmatic actions have created perceptions of inefficiency and contradiction which are exploited by opponents of the programs and missions. To address these structural flaws, I recommend the creation of a Deputy National Security Advisor committed explicitly and exclusively to reducing the threats we face from weapons of mass destruction. This individual would be responsible for leading and enforcing interagency decisions and for creating a unified programmatic budget presentation. In whatever manner Congress and the Executive Branch decide to organize our programs, and there are many effective ways to do so, they must have high-level Presidential attention. Any organizational structure with high-level attention will be better than the best organizational structure with low-level attention. Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions. TESTIMONY OF LEONARD S. SPECTOR,1 DEPUTY DIRECTOR, Mr. SPECTOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee on improving the effective of U.S. nonproliferation programs in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. I want to try to emphasize three themes today. The first is that the indecision of the administration, and what I think has to be characterized to some degree as "dithering," is damaging our efforts to control weapons of mass destruction material and expertise in the Newly Independent States, especially in Russia. I think this is an especially troubling situation given the new urgency that has emerged to deal with these matters, in light of the September 11 events. The second theme I want to emphasize is that the programs that are functioning could function much more efficiently and more effectively if they could be better integrated and if there were better planning among them and better oversight from above. I will sup 1The prepared statement of Mr. Spector with attchments appears in the appendix on page port the current legislation in some of my comments in terms of its approach. And finally, I want to comment on the private-public partnerships and just note how important a role they have played historically in this area and how important a role they are playing today. The fundamental goal of the majority of the programs that are operating in Russia today and the other Newly Independent States, especially those whose purpose is to secure and eliminate fissile material and to provide employment for Soviet weapons of mass destruction scientists, is to prevent terrorists and states of proliferation concern from acquiring these materials and getting access to this expertise. As such, the programs are an integral and highly important component of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Osama bin Laden, as we know, has been seeking weapons of mass destruction, and, of course, he recently claimed to possess chemical and nuclear weapons, although most observers, disbelieve that latter claim of possession of nuclear weapons. He is also known to have extensive links throughout the former Soviet Union. It is worth recalling the scale of the Soviet weapons of mass destruction legacy. The Department of Energy estimates that Russia possesses 603 tons of weapons-usable fissile materials, that is plutonium or highly enriched uranium, outside of weapons. That is enough for 41,000 nuclear arms. And to provide a benchmark, let us just consider what North Korea may have. It is said by the U.S. Government to possess enough plutonium for one or two nuclear weapons, and we all know how serious we take that national security threat. But one or two weapons is less than five-one-thousandths of a percent of the Russian stockpile of weapons-grade material that I described earlier. One shudders to imagine the mischief that Osama bin Laden or a terrorist of his ilk might cause, if he were to obtain a comparably minuscule fraction of the nuclear weapons material in Russia. Russia also possesses a vast arsenal of chemical weapons that are now currently awaiting destruction with U.S. assistance, if we can get the program moving, and they also possess the ability to manufacture the world's most potent biological weapons. The bulk of these various weapons-of-mass-destruction materials are not subject to adequate security measures. Despite new evidence of terrorist interest in acquiring and using WMD, the Bush Administration has not acted to accelerate efforts to improve security over these materials and over WMD expertise in the former Soviet States. Indeed, nearly 10 months after taking office, as Ms. Holgate just noted, and really throughout an entire budget cycle, the administration is still "reviewing" U.S. nonproliferation programs in Russia. It is apparently unable to decide whether and/or how to pursue a number of the critically important initiatives that are already underway. Inexplicably, the one point that the administration has decided upon is that the programs do not need additional funding, and that, accordingly, no monies from the $40 billion in anti-terrorist funds that will be made available by the Congress should be used for the purpose of helping secure weapons-grade materials and ex Let me review with you a few of the programs. I have listed quite a few in my testimony. I will try to just summarize and only hit the highlights. Perhaps the most salient of the programs for dealing with the Soviet nuclear legacy, is the Material Protection Control and Accounting Program at the Department of Energy. As was pointed out earlier by the GAO, to date, this program has made great strides. It has, I believe, protected about 200 tons of weapons-grade material. It is roughly a third of the 603 tons that now needs to be secured. The remaining material will not receive so-called "rapid upgrades" until 2007 and it will not be comprehensively secured until 2011. Surprisingly, the Bush Administration's fiscal year 2002 budget reduced the funding for this program to a bit below the fiscal year 2001 levels, (although 2 weeks ago, Congress increased support for this effort above the administration's request, from $143 million up to $173 million). The events of September 11 call for additional funding. Now, I was at the Department of Energy when we put together the previous administration's budget in this field, and I know that there were other parts of this program that are not going to be addressed in the coming year because of these lower budget numbers. We all know that not every item on the wish list can be funded, but I know that we will not be doing some very important work because of the administration's hesitancy in moving forward. Now, one way that we can rapidly improve security over tons of material is to complete another one of these material security programs in Russia, and that is to complete the facility at Mayak, known as the Fissile Material Storage Facility. We have already spent $400 million on this facility, and it is supposed to be operational in the coming year, when it will secure 6 tons of weaponsgrade material. They will load it at a rate of about 6 tons per year and eventually 25 tons of plutonium will be secured. What is holding up the operation of this facility is we cannot quite come to conclusion with the Russians on measures for having confidence about what goes into the facility and mechanisms for monitoring it. This has been a problem for a number of years, but it is not moving forward, in part because it is not getting high-level attention at the Pentagon, where this program sits. It is extremely important when you have a high-level official from the Pentagon here to ask what steps he is taking to make this $400 million investment good. We have to take advantage of this facility in the coming year, and I think the ball is very definitely in the court of the Pentagon. Another program which I think has been an unalloyed success and is widely applauded is the High Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement. This is an agreement under which weapons-grade material is blended down to non-weapons-grade nuclear power plant fuel in Russia and then purchased by the United States and used to fuel U.S. nuclear power plants. This is where 110 tons of material have indeed been removed from being a problem. This 110 tons is no longer usable for weapons, a very large quantities. But the program itself will last for many more years and needs to be accel The intellectual father of the program, Thomas Neff of MIT, believes that with some ingenuity, we could double the rate of downblending from 30 tons a year to 60 tons a year at a cost of roughly $150 million per year, but the bulk of this money will come back to us when that uranium would be sold on the open market some years from now. The President is looking into this, supposedly. I had an interview with Robert Joseph at the National Security Council, which is an on-the-record interview that we published recently in the Nonproliferation Review. He said that this program was "under review." The administration was trying to stabilize it in some fashion. But it was clear there was no impetus, no energy to try to make the program move at a faster pace and to try to introduce some new thinking as to how this might work. Other programs are also losing momentum, including one that Ms. Holgate used to run at the Department of Energy, is the Plutonium Disposition Program. This program desperately needs leadership and drive from high up in the administration because it requires the participation of foreign governments. Because of uncertainties about funding and the lack of such leadership, the program has lost a year, an entire year, in its efforts to eliminate and dispose of 34 metric tons of Russian weapons plutonium, which would basically be removed from a concern if we could get the program on track and moving forward. Again, the problem, I would say, lies with the administration in its slowness to come to a conclusion about the program and in its reluctance to champion it internationally. There are several other programs that are worthy of mention. The plutonium production reactor shutdown agreement would end production of new plutonium. Why do we want the Russians making more plutonium? We have a program to end this. Again, it is falling on hard times in the sense that it is not getting the leadership from the Pentagon that it needs: In particular, a solution was reached to actually get this program implemented during the last part of the Clinton Administration. It has not yet been embraced by the Bush Administration, but it is ready and, I think, a very thoughtful solution. This needs to be pried out of the bureaucracy and made to move forward. Let me only turn to one or two other points here in reviewing some of these programs. A program that I participated in while I was at the Department of Energy was to go around to small research reactors outside of Russia and try to bring weapons-grade material back into Russia to be consolidated and down-blended. The material is used as fuel at these facilities, and one facility of particular concern was in the former Yugoslavia. Now with the change of government there, the dangers are reduced, but it is a significant quantity of material and we need to get this program moving forward. We also need to try to move material out of Belarus and out of the Kharkiv reactor in the Ukraine. Tactical nuclear weapons, just to change focus a bit, are another area that has not gotten attention under this administration or the previous administration. There are thousands of them in Russia. We have done some work to secure them, but there is no work to |