NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2001

According to the Baltimore Sun:

The price tag over the next decade for the United States to invest in its anti-proliferation in the former Soviet Union could reach $30 billion annually – five times the current cost of $600 million a year – a situation described as "a bottomless pit."

Such news comes at a time when the new administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will be asking Congress for a far more expensive national missile defense system than the one proposed by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

The sobering look at the largely ineffectual efforts by the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to fund adequate controls over nuclear technology, weapons and weapons-grade materials in Russia is contained in a report, due out Wednesday, by former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. and former White House counsel Lloyd N. Cutler.

The Baker-Cutler findings include:

• Tons of Russian nuclear-weapons material – referred to as "loose nukes" – are ill-accounted-for and scattered throughout the country in more than 100 poorly guarded depots.

• They are readily susceptible to theft, unauthorized sales and smuggling out of Russia into terrorist hands.

• So loose is the situation that it is entirely possible one or more terrorist groups may have already gotten hands on enough weapons-grade materials to create nuclear bombs.

• Energy Department programs developed in the Clinton-Gore administration to improve the situation have proved inadequate.

• U.S. spending to correct the situation should be roughly quintupled over the coming 10 years.

According to one source on the Baker-Cutler task force, appointed in March by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson:

"The group felt very strongly that the threat of loose nuclear material falling into illicit hands was a very dangerous one.

"It's not as though we haven’t learned anything [from anti-proliferation programs in Russia] but now, as we find out more, we’re thinking, ‘Holy smokes, what else is out there?’ "

Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said:

"There is definitely evidence of lax security, and there is definitely evidence of vulnerabilities, of deficiencies.

"Part of the problem is the security and accounting are so lax that it’s hard to know whether any of [the nuclear material] has been ripped off."

The situation has grown so severe that Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeev and Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin have quietly asked U.S. officials for more assistance in controlling Russia’s nuclear inventory, Blair said.

The Baker-Cutler report may recommend to the Bush-Cheney administration the creation of a "loose-nukes czar" to coordinate the overlapping and at times conflicting roles of various U.S. agencies dealing with the problem.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Russia
Missile Defense