Securing Nuclear Materials -
To begin with, then, let's take a look at the candidates' words:
KERRY: ... There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it. ...
And this president, I regret to say, has secured less nuclear material in the last two years since 9/11 than we did in the two years preceding 9/11.
We have to do this job. And to do the job, you can't cut the money for it. The president actually cut the money for it. You have to put the money into it and the funding and the leadership.
...
BUSH: Actually, we've increased funding for dealing with nuclear proliferation about 35 percent since I've been the president. Secondly, we've set up what's called the -- well, first of all, I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network. And that's why proliferation is one of the centerpieces of a multi-prong strategy to make the country safer.
My administration started what's called the Proliferation Security Initiative. Over 60 nations involved with disrupting the trans-shipment of information and/or weapons of mass destruction materials.
As the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus relate, Bush here appears to be falling back on a regular habit of his, wherein he opposes a program or budget item and then, when faced with strong Congressional opposition, flip-flops on the issue and begins to take credit as though it was his own great idea all along. (Readers of Molly Ivins' Shrub may notice this well-ingrained character quirk of Bush's dating all the way back to his relations with the Texas lege.) In any case, the verdict here is not kind to Bush's protestations, as we see that
Bush said he has increased spending on curbing nuclear proliferation by "about 35 percent" since he took office. But in his first budget, he proposed a 13 percent cut -- about $116 million -- and much of the increases since then have been added by Congress.
As for Kerry's assertion that it will take as many as thirteen years to secure all former Soviet nuclear material under the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction program, he may have actually been a little generous, as the Democratic Policy Committee gives a range of anywhere between 10 and 15 years.
The Bush Administration, however, appears to feel no sense of urgency for completing the work. Overall funding for Nunn-Lugar activities would remain the same, at $1 billion per year, in Bush's Fiscal Year 2005 budget, despite calls by the House Homeland Security Committee Minority Staff and several nonproliferation experts to triple overall spending to $3 billion.
At the present funding levels, Nunn-Lugar projects will not be completed for another 10-15 years. Moreover, the Bush Administration's budget proposes a 10 percent cut in the Department of Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction program; a decrease in funding for cooperative US-Russian biological research, which employs many Russian scientists that once worked on the USSR's biological weapons program, whom experts fear may otherwise be tempted to offer their expertise to the highest bidder, from $37 million to $13 million; and a $20 million decrease in Department of Energy programs to secure fissile materials in the former Soviet Union.
The FY 2005 budget actually contains a 9.2% proposed cut in the Nunn-Lugar program. Senator Lugar himself says that this isn't necessarily a problem, since money in the pipeline at the moment should be enough to carry out current programs, and to the President's credit he appears to have endorsed legislation on the part of Senators Lugar, John Warner and Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee to expand the Nunn-Lugar program outside the confines of the Soviet Union to other "proliferation emergencies", signing it into law in 2003. As Senator Lugar tells it, many of the problems confronting the successful further implementation of the Nunn-Lugar program revolve less around funding levels than they do Russian intraginence:
At this stage, diplomatic breakthroughs with resistant Russian authorities are almost a prerequisite to putting major funding increases to work. Although the Russian government has opened a remarkable number of facilities to the Nunn-Lugar program, others remain closed. Convincing Russia to accelerate its dismantlement schedules, to conclude umbrella agreements that limit liability for contractors, and to open its remaining closed facilities are the most immediate challenges for Nunn-Lugar. Whoever wins election in November must make the removal of these roadblocks a priority. As the roadblocks are removed, Congress and the President, as well as our allies, must commit the funds necessary to exploit the openings.
While programs like Nunn-Lugar concentrate on existing known stockpiles of Russian nuclear material, the President's Proliferation Security Initiative aims at interdiction of suspected WMD shipments through international waters and has been principally targeted against North Korea more than anybody else at this point. The principal mission as summarized by this Global Security.org briefing on the subject is "seek[ing] to involve in some capacity all states that have a stake in nonproliferation and the ability and willingness to take steps to stop the flow of such items at sea, in the air, or on land. The PSI also seeks cooperation from any state whose vessels, flags, ports, territorial waters, airspace, or land might be used for proliferation purposes by states and non-state actors of proliferation concern. The increasingly aggressive efforts by proliferators to stand outside or to circumvent existing nonproliferation norms, and to profit from such trade, requires new and stronger actions by the international community." It has a pretty strong roster of members (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the US), and has been conducting training exercises together over the past few months. Kerry's proposal to combat nuclear proliferation promises to expand on it further, noting that
Only approximately 15 percent of the world's 50,000 large cargo ships are subject to inspection on short notice, and fewer than 20 countries are full participants in the PSI. John Kerry will work with allies to increase participation so that instead of relying on coalitions of the willing, we can create the broader international framework necessary to make such an operation more effective. He will also work to improve the PSI by expanding it to include air and ground transportation.
The Bush administration's lackluster spending on programs like Nunn-Lugar and its chronic difficulty when it comes to engaging and building strong international institutions as opposed to gathering ad hoc coalitions, I think, does not serve it well when it comes to efforts at securing loose nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Whether they take place in a Siberian missile dump or the deck of a cargo ship running a Panamanian flag and a hold filled with uranium centrifuge tubes, these sorts of efforts require a break with traditional conceptions of state sovereignty in favor of a concerted multinational policing effort that, I believe, ultimately cannot stand on the weight of U.S. pressure to join our efforts alone. The election of a Kerry government to Washington alone is not going to be enough to make Russia open up its last weapons labs nor will it convince North Korea to suddenly start respecting our arms embargoes, but his recognition of the need for a real supranational framework (under US leadership, obviously) to combat this sort of problem makes me far more optimistic as to his chances of effectively implementing programs like an expanded PSI or Nunn-Lugar in the future.
Next up: "What To Do With Countries Who've Already Got Their Hands On The Damn Things", or "Seoul Was Getting Too Crowded Anyhow"
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