resources, and focus programs more clearly on common goals and objectives. However, the legislation did not address a number of other problems that I have just talked about, such as limited access to sensitive Russian sites and various program management concerns. However, the coordinating body envisioned by the legislation could serve as a vehicle to share information and best practices for addressing these types of problems. We also believe the bill could be strengthened by mandating development of an overarching strategic plan that clearly identifies overall goals, time frames for meeting these goals, and ways to set priorities for allocating resources government-wide to address nonproliferation concerns. Both the Deutch Commission and the Baker-Cutler Task Force believe that such a strategic plan was the missing element from the U.S. Government implementation of nonproliferation programs. Building on the individual programs' strategic plans, a government-wide plan could also address questions such as are the end dates for the completion of the various nonproliferation programs, such as securing nuclear materials in Russia, still viable? How can the security improvements made be sustained beyond the completion of the programs? And in light of September 11, do we continue to have the right mix of nonproliferation programs needed to address the varying security problems facing our Nation? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Ms. Jones. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CLELAND Senator CLELAND. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank particularly our colleague, Senator Hagel, and the witnesses who appear here today to testify about this important subject. The threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction that are retained in the states comprising the former Soviet Union is actually mind boggling. I was struck by the fact that a bipartisan task force headed by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler has recently called this, "the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States," and called for a four-fold funding increase for our threat reduction efforts. In the wake of September 11, we cannot hesitate to take strong action to implement this recommendation. We are indeed fortunate that 10 years ago, a group of distinguished Senators, including my friend and the former Senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, put in place what has come to be known as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act. The programs that have been carried out under this legislation have, without a doubt, profoundly improved the security of the United States and may well have prevented a far worse catastrophe than what we have recently experienced. I reiterate my support for these programs and call for the enhanced funding recommended by the bipartisan task force mentioned previously. To the purpose of this hearing, I say that the proposed legislation sources for cooperative threat reduction and I support it. I also believe that the committee proposed by the Nonproliferation Assistance Coordination Act of 2001 will need a highly-placed advocate to ensure that its mandate is effectively carried out. To that end, I endorse Ms. Holgate's recommendation for the creation of a Deputy National Security Advisor committed exclusively to reducing the threats we face from weapons of mass destruction. This threat is far too grave to go without such an advocate. I am convinced that our national security depends upon the effective coordination and resourcing that this position will enable. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much for your statement and your support. I would like to now call on Ms. Holgate for her testimony. TESTIMONY OF LAURA S.H. HOLGATE,1 VICE PRESIDENT FOR RUSSIAN NEWLY INDEPENDENT STATES PROGRAMS, NUCLEAR THREAT INITIATIVE Ms. HOLGATE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and other Subcommittee Members for the opportunity to testify today about how the U.S. Government can strengthen its efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and keep them from falling into the hands of groups and states who would do us harm. The Nation and the world discovered on September 11 that there are terrorist forces in the world who will stop at nothing in their efforts to take innocent lives. The work that the U.S. Government does to reduce the threat from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials is our first line of defense in keeping these weapons out of terrorist hands. Dismantling weapons, securing material, eliminating infrastructure, and directing know-how to peaceful pursuits, all of these play an essential role in fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We have taken important steps towards these problems, but to protect the security of the American people, we need giant strides, so I would like to thank the Chairman and the Members of the Subcommittee for putting the spotlight on this issue and giving me and others a chance to contribute our ideas. President Bush clearly shares the concern that has been noted by Howard Baker, Lloyd Cutler, and many others in the introductory comments to this hearing. Two years ago at the Reagan Library, candidate Bush praised, "the foresight and statesmanship of Senators Lugar and Nunn for their legislation to improve security at many Russian nuclear facilities," and then he added, “A great deal of Russian nuclear material cannot be accounted for. The next President must press for an accurate inventory of all this material and we must do more. I will ask the Congress to increase substantially our assistance to dismantle as many of Russia's weapons as possible as quickly as possible." Sadly, the administration's actions in the first months of its tenure fall short of the vision and purpose articulated by President Bush. Earlier this year, the administration announced a review of 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 ef fective 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 ef fectively 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 |