Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Ted Turner

  • Avoiding a Russian Arms Disaster

    Hurricane Katrina drove home the staggering devastation that disasters — natural or man-made –can inflict. Meanwhile, July’s attacks on the London Underground reminded us terrorists can still strike major world cities. Now imagine the two joined together: terrorists, armed with weapons of mass destruction, unleashing Katrina-scale chaos and death in the heart of a U.S. city.

    Such attacks are hardly unthinkable. Roughly half of Russia’s weapons-grade nuclear materials are poorly protected. In the small Russian town of Shchuch’ye, nearly 2 million shells of VX and sarin nerve gas — each lethal enough to kill 85,000 people — lay stacked in chicken cooplike structures. The September 11 commission said al Qaeda has pursued getting and using these weapons as a “religious obligation” for more than a decade.

    Fortunately, unlike hurricanes, much can be done to prevent this nightmare from becoming real. One of our first and best lines of defense is the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, created by former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, Georgia Democrat, and Sen. Richard Lugar, Indiana Republican. Since 1992, the program has eliminated thousands of Russian nuclear warheads, missiles, submarines and bombers.

    But in recent years, a set of burdensome congressional restrictions has marred the program and led to a series of disruptive stop-and-start cycles. Key projects vital to America’s security have ground to a halt for months on end because, for example, Russian human-rights obligations were not met or the paperwork to waive them was not completed.

    Congress now has the chance to end such dangerous disruptions once and for all. Mr. Lugar, decrying those misplaced priorities, introduced language to repeal all the restrictions, which the Senate embraced by an overwhelming, bipartisan 78-19 vote in July. But until the full Congress approves it, CTR’s vital efforts remain in danger, from both a national security and a business perspective.

    Danger of delay: Current restrictions carry real costs on the ground. In mid-2002, all new CTR projects — including security upgrades at 10 nuclear weapons storage sites — stalled for four months because the conditions could not be certified. Destruction of the Shchuch’ye stockpile was delayed some 15 months from 2001 to 2003 for similar red-tape reasons.

    Such stoppages not only prolong threats to America, they also endanger the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars already invested in Shchuch’ye and other projects. So long as the conditions remain, these dangerous disruptions are inevitable.

    Wasted resources: In a yearly drama, defense staffers and intelligence analysts must spend thousands of hours assessing Russian compliance with CTR restrictions — even when it is immediately clear Russia cannot meet them. Nor can the president simply waive the conditions without first submitting to this annual exercise in foregone conclusions.

    Abetting such delays or allowing concerns like human rights, however important, to threaten human existence massively is the height of folly. We not only agree with Mr. Lugar that, during a war on terror, these artificial barriers “are destructive to our national security”; we see them undermining one of the best investments our country can make.

    CTR, simply is good security on the cheap. At an annual cost of as little as one-tenth of 1 percent (0.001) of the Pentagon budget, the program has deactivated and helped guard 6,760 Russian nuclear warheads. It has upgraded security to the Shchuch’ye depot and similar sites. It also helped remove all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

    Today, CTR continues upgrading security and aiding accounting of nuclear weapons transportation and storage. It also works to destroy biological weapons production facilities and lock down pathogen collections in Russia and the former Soviet republics.

    CTR’s largest current project, eliminating the Shchuch’ye stockpile, will rid us of all 2 million of those weapons — and cost each American roughly the same as a large latte.

    Nor is this money “foreign aid”: More than 80 percent of CTR funds go to five U.S. prime contractors that dismantle and destroy these weapons.

    The risk of a Katrina-scale terrorist attack with Russian weapons is too critical to tolerate any delays to these crucial efforts. Congress must act and free us to meet what President Bush calls “the greatest threat before humanity today.”

    Ted Turner is chairman of Turner Enterprises in Atlanta. Stanley A. Weiss is chairman of Business Executives for National Security, of which Mr. Turner is a member.

  • U.S. Can’t Ignore Nuclear Threat

    Originally Published in USA TODAY

    I’m worried that we’re about to make the same mistake we made a decade ago.

    In August of 1991, when a coup by Soviet hard-liners fell apart, then-president Mikhail Gorbachev gave credit to live global television for keeping world attention on the action, and Time magazine wrote: ”Momentous things happened precisely because they were being seen as they happened.”

    But if good things can happen because a lot of people are watching, bad things can happen when few people are watching. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the media moved off the story of the nuclear threat — and we moved into the new world order without undoing the danger of the old world order.

    In the wake of Sept. 11, people are realizing that the nuclear threat didn’t end with the Cold War. Soviet weapons, materials and know-how are still there, more dangerous than ever. Russia’s economic troubles weakened controls on them, and global terrorists are trying harder to get them.

    When President Bush (news – web sites) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (news – web sites) meet in Moscow next week, they will sign a treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on each side. They need to reduce a lot more than that. Some of the poisonous byproducts of the two powers’ arms race are piled high in poorly guarded facilities across 11 time zones. They offer mad fools the power to kill millions.

    At a Bush-Putin news conference two months after the terrorist attacks, Bush declared: ”Our highest priority is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.” He also has told his national security staff to give nuclear terrorism top priority.

    Where’s the money?

    But it’s hard to see this priority in the budget and policies of the administration. Not a dollar of the $38 billion the administration requested in new spending for homeland defense will address loose weapons, materials and know-how in Russia. The total spending on these programs — even after Sept. 11 — has remained flat at about a billion dollars a year, even though, at this rate, we will still not have secured all loose nuclear materials in Russia for years to come.

    But what worries me most is not the lack of new spending, but the lack of new thinking. Where are the new ideas for preventing nuclear terrorism?

    We can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing, and we can’t just copy old plans; we’ve got to innovate. If we are hit with one of these weapons because we slept through this wake-up call from hell, it will be the most shameful failure of national defense in the history of the United States.

    Waning public interest

    Unfortunately, public pressure for action is weak, partly because media attention on nuclear terrorism has begun to fade. And it’s fading not because the threat has been addressed or reduced, but because the media cover what changes, and threats don’t change much day to day. They just keep on ticking.

    The media need to stay on this story because it’s harder to get government action when there’s not much media coverage. If something’s not in the media, it’s not in the public mind. If it’s not in the public mind, there’s little political pressure to act. If public attention moves off this nuclear threat before the government has moved to reduce it, we will be making the same mistake we made after 1991.

    Leadership, however, means being out in front even if no one’s pushing from behind. Bush and Putin need to think bigger and do more. They need to reduce the chance that terrorists can steal nuclear weapons or materials or hire away weapons scientists. They need to work together as partners in fighting terror and encourage others to join. They need to launch a worldwide plan to identify weapons, materials and know-how and secure all of it, everywhere, now — if we are to avoid Armageddon.
    *CNN founder Ted Turner last year established the Nuclear Threat Initiative, dedicated to reducing the threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He has pledged to provide $250 million to fund its activities.