RISK ASSESSMENT: RUSSIA
Excerpt from Jim Lehrer News Hour
Securing the world's largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the
former Soviet Union. (This show aired on November 5, 2001.)
November 6, 20001
pbs.org
BETTY ANN BOWSER: When
the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991, the newly independent
republics had the largest arsenal
of nuclear warheads, enriched
uranium, and plutonium in the
world. Today, ten years after the
end of Cold War, that is still the case: At least 1,500
metric tons of uranium and plutonium that could be used to
make nuclear weapons remain scattered at locations all
over the former Soviet Union, and much of it is unsecured.
Experts worry what would happen if it fell into the wrong
hands.
Possible contamination
ROSE GOTTEMOELLER, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace: We're concerned, for example, that a
small nuclear warhead, even smaller than the Hiroshima
bomb, could take out lower Manhattan completely, cause
much more devastation than the devastation of the Twin
Towers.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Rose Gottemoeller was the
Clinton administration's top non-proliferation official at the
Department of Energy. Now, she's a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment.
ROSE GOTTEMOELLER:
Frankly, I think it's more likely,
is the possibility of a radiological
attack, that somebody would get
a hold of either a warhead or
some material and just break it
apart over a geographic area,
and that would cause a great deal of contamination-- not
immediate deaths from blast effects, but perhaps
longer-term contamination and deaths from nuclear
materials.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Last year Gottemoeller visited a
plutonium reprocessing plant in Russia.
ROSE GOTTEMOELLER: They didn't have any bars on
its windows, just had a big wooden door with a huge key,
like a medieval-size key, that they turned to open the door,
and when you walked in there, basically down in the floor
there were hundreds of buckets of plutonium. When I went
into the facility one day, one of the, one of the technicians
pulled one of them out of the floor and handed it to me and
said, "feel it-- it feels warm. It's full of plutonium."
So it's the kind of situation where, if somebody was an
insider, particularly, who needed some extra money,
maybe hadn't been paid for a while, we were very
concerned and had been very concerned that those
buckets of plutonium could go missing.
U.S. aid to security programs
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Kenneth Luongo, who
preceded Gottemoeller in the same job in the Clinton
Administration, has also been a frequent visitor to Russian
nuclear facilities.
KENNETH LUONGO,
Russian American Nuclear
Security Advisory Council: I've
seen highly enriched uranium in a
tube that would fit in a briefcase
inside the equivalent of a gym
locker with two strings and a
wax seal.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Is that enough to make a
bomb?
KENNETH LUONGO: It's enough to do serious damage,
just sitting there behind a huge vault door that had a lock
that could be opened with a skeleton key.
BETTY ANN BOWSER:
Attempts have been made to
increase security. In the early
'90s, Congress funded a
Department of Energy program
to help the Russians make it
harder for their nuclear materials
to get into the hands of terrorists.
Examples of what's been done
can be seen in these DOE
photographs: Removing an old wooden door at one
Russian facility and replacing it with a steel secured door;
at another, cutting the grass, paving over mud, and
installing a heavy steel gate.
The Bush Administration's newly
sworn-in DOE official in charge
of the program, Linton Brooks,
describes what else has been
done.
LINTON BROOKS,
Department of Energy, Nuclear
Security Official: Secondly, we
work with the Russians to try
and consolidate the materials so
there are fewer places to take highly enriched uranium
which is weapons-usable, and blend it down into a form
that's not. Third, in another part of our organization we are
working with the Russians to actually eliminate plutonium.
Security could take years
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But former Senator Sam Nunn,
who co-sponsored legislation that created the DOE
Program, says it's not enough.
SAM NUNN, Nuclear Threat Initiative: There's very little
protection for about 60 percent of the weapons material in
Russia. That doesn't mean there's no protection; it means
there's very poor protection, and not the kind of security
standards that we would even think about tolerating here.
We have helped them on about 40 percent of those
vulnerable materials-- that's the good news; the bad news
is that at the rate we're going, if we don't accelerate it, it's
going to take us 20, 25 years at the rate we're going now
to have the Russian weapons material under the proper
kind of safeguard.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Nunn and other non-
proliferation advocates are concerned about reports in the
past few days from the International Atomic Energy
Agency that indicate there have been 175 cases of
trafficking in nuclear material in the past few years, and
some evidence that suggests bin Laden's al-Qaida network
has tried to buy nuclear materials.
SAM NUNN: Based on all the
reports, we've seen that if they
do have the ability to kill a major
number, a massive number of
people, they'll do it, and it seems
to me that that should tell us, if
they get control of nuclear
weapons or nuclear materials from which they could make
either an explosive nuclear device or a radiological device,
that they would not hesitate to use it against America or
against other people in the world.
Program for national security
BETTY ANN BOWSER: When he ran for office,
President Bush said securing the nuclear material would be
a priority.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: 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 insistence to dismantle as many of Russia's
weapons as possible as quickly as possible.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But one of the things the new
Bush Administration cut in its budget was the $100 million
allocated for the DOE program. Then last week Congress
restored $70 million of that.
LINTON BROOKS: This
program is not a charity
program. This program is in the
direct personal interest of the
safety of every American. This is
national security at its finest,
where we prevent problems
from happening, and so I don't think there's any dispute
about the importance of this program in the administration.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Critics still complain that no
money from the emergency homeland security
appropriation was set aside, and more resources are
needed.
ROSE GOTTEMOELLER: Well, frankly, I wish that both
governments were taking it a little more seriously than they
have. I haven't noticed in either Washington or Moscow a
particular intensification of efforts since September 11.
Clearly everybody's got other fish to fry. There are lots of
active military issues to resolve. We're fighting a war.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: There is one thing both sides do
agree on: They hope the program to secure Russian
nuclear material will be on the agenda when Presidents
Bush and Putin meet next week. |
