SECTION 3. NON-PROLIFERATION PROCESSES AND INITIATIVES

1. Move to Control Danger Materials Gains Support (Financial Times, 27 September 2001)

    An often-troubled joint effort by the US and Russia to control materials for weapons of mass destruction and provide jobs for the scientists who created them is now drawing new support in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

With the practical need for a united front against terrorism made brutally clear, there are quiet calls for renewed attention to a series of bilateral non-proliferation programmes among security experts.

A spokesman for Senator Richard Lugar, former chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said there were hopes for additional funding for the effort, which next year is expected to disburse about Dollars 750m. A long-awaited Dollars 35m US contribution to a Dollars 200m plant to destroy chemical weapons is now slated for passage.

The Bush administration had been prepared to delay an expensive scheme planned by the Clinton administration to destroy excess plutonium and to cut a programme designed to assist Russian scientists in two former secret Soviet "nuclear cities" find new jobs or start new companies.

The Russian-American Nuclear Security Administration Council, a non-proliferation think-tank, last week wrote to President George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, urging them to overcome bureaucratic barriers to co-operation.

They called for intensified efforts on a number of fronts, including control of nuclear materials, disposal of materials from dismantled warheads, exchanges of intelligence on smuggling and interdiction efforts, and downsizing of Russia's nuclear weapons complexes.

Between 1992 and 2000, the US allocated almost Dollars 5bn for non-proliferation and security programmes with former Soviet republics. Currently, the Defence Department spends about Dollars 400m a year to help Russia and other former Soviet republics secure and reduce the nuclear arsenal left by the Soviet Union.

The Energy Department is spending about Dollars 300m a year to control the disposition of plutonium, uranium and other dangerous materials and for "brain drain" programmes to employ and retrain Russian scientists, who might otherwise feel compelled to offer their services to terrorist states. (The Russian government stopped a group leaving for North Korea in 1996.)

The State Department spends about Dollars 50m a year on programmes to provide employment for former Soviet scientists. The US and other countries have found work for about 45,000 former weapons scientists out of a target group of 100,000.

"This was never designed to be the universal solution (for the unemployed scientists)," said Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton administration official now with Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think-tank. "It was to provide a pressure release valve during a prolonged transition." (http://www.ft.com/)

2. National Nuclear Security Administration To Help Train Former Soviet WMD Scientists In Commercial Information Technology Fields (National Nuclear Security Administration, 4 October 2001)

    The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and a leading Russian Information Technology (IT) company are cooperating to help reduce the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The NNSA's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP) program seeks to engage WMD experts at former Soviet facilities in the development of commercial technologies for peaceful purposes.

Kenneth E. Baker, NNSA Acting Deputy Administrator stated, "The Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program prevents such expertise from spreading to states or terrorist organizations that seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction by engaging WMD experts in non-military applications."

LUXOFT, a member company of the IBS Group, and its U.S. partner, CTG, Inc. of Wayne, PA, plan to train as many as 500 nuclear professionals at the Moscow-based Kurchatov Institute, Russia's premier nuclear research facility, in a broad range of IT applications in the next few years. LUXOFT experts will spend nine months training Kurchatov scientists. After the initial nine-month training program, LUXOFT plans to expand the training to other nuclear weapons facilities.

Both LUXOFT and CTG are members of the U.S. Industry Coalition (USIC), a non-profit association of companies and universities that are active partners in the NNSA-IPP program. USIC works to facilitate technology commercialization for its members.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, concerns about potential use of WMD technologies by terrorist groups have been heightened. The IPP program is critical to U.S. national security as it works to reduce this threat. Since 1994, the IPP program has engaged thousands of former Soviet scientists and engineers in peaceful technology development, thereby preventing such experts from exporting their knowledge to those seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. (http://www.ransac.org/)

3. Senate Democrats To Fight Funding Ban On New Russian Power Plants (11 October 2001)

    When House and Senate conferees are chosen to hash out a final version of the fiscal year 2002 defense authorization bill, one of the items they'll consider is a House provision that prohibits the use of Cooperative Threat Reduction funds to replace three plutonium-producing power plants in Russia with conventional sources of energy.

The Senate's bill does not include the prohibition, and Senate Democrats in conference will work to prevent its inclusion in the bill that will be sent to President Bush, sources said this week. Who will represent each chamber in the conference is undecided, but staffers from both Armed Services committees are meeting informally this week to discuss conference issues, a congressional source said Oct. 10.

Lawmakers plan to begin the conference next week and finish work on the defense bill by the end of this month.

A congressional source said those who support the ban on CTR funds are looking at the issue from "too narrow a perspective." The focus should be on achieving an important nonproliferation objective, not on where the money will come from, the source added.

Other sources said the ban is also being opposed because it would contradict Bush administration policy on building fossil fuel plants in Russia with DOD dollars. Moreover, DOD officials said they wanted to be in charge of eliminating the three plutonium production plants when some lawmakers in the past proposed giving the mission to the Energy Department, the sources said.

The House Armed Services Committee was unable to respond to ITP's request for comment on its CTR prohibition by press time (Oct. 10). The committee, though, has "traditionally supported the overriding goal of the CTR program to reduce the threat to the United States posed by the former Soviet Union's residual weapons of mass destruction," the panel's report states.

However, in recent years the committee has raised concerns about the CTR program, including an expansion in the program's scope, the difficulty of measuring the success and efficiency of various CTR projects, the lack of transparency agreements with Russia, the possibility that Moscow might be using CTR money for arms modernization, and whether certain CTR efforts should be funded by agencies outside DOD, the report states.

To William Hoehn, director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council's Washington, DC, office, the House prohibition on CTR funds represents the "sort of bureaucratic nonsense" the he says should have been cast aside after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Following those strikes, RANSAC asked officials in the United States and Russia to place a higher priority on achieving nonproliferation goals to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists groups.

Concern about whether it is appropriate for DOD to fund Russian fossil fuel plant construction should take a back seat to getting the plutonium production reactors off line, Hoehn told ITP Oct. 10.

"It is frightening that there are officials comfortable saying, in essence, that an extra one and half tons of plutonium in that part of the world each year isn't a bad thing," he said. "We should be doing everything within our power to put a lid on proliferation risks, and these guys are trying to hold the process up over a technicality." (http://www.ransac.org/)

4. Romanian Intelligence Service Denies Reports on Nuclear Trafficking (REF/RL Newsline, 17 October 2001)

    Media reports claiming that Romania's territory is being used for the purpose of smuggling nuclear materials are attempts to discredit the country's international image, Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) spokesman Marius Bercaru told Mediafax on 16 October. Bercaru reacted to a report by the Moldovan BASA Press claiming that Interpol is investigating the trafficking of nuclear materials between the Transdniester and Bosnia via Romania. BASA Press attributed the reports to Italian media. It cited Paolo Sartori, the chief of Italian Interpol, as saying in an interview on national television that the investigation began after a group belonging to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organization was uncovered in Bosnia. (http://www.rferl.org/)

5. Latvia, Ukraine to Cooperate in area of Nuclear Safety (оое Monitoring Service, 18 October 2001)

    Latvia and Ukraine closed an agreement on information exchange in the area of nuclear safety, the Interfax agency reported.

The agreement was closed during the visit of Latvian Environment Protection and Regional Development Minister Vladimirs Makarovs to Ukraine.

Under the agreement the two parties also undertake to notify each other immediately in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk/)