U.S.-Russian nuclear arms cooperation is not dead, it just needs a good kick in the pants.
Boost Phase - by William Tobey
Last week, alarm bells rang as the first headlines ran about Moscow’s “bombshell” decision not to renew the 1992 Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Agreement underpinning efforts to improve nuclear security. Perhaps it was the context of chilling relations with Putin’s Russia, including the crackdown on nongovernmental organizations and the eviction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, that evoked such angst. The claim that U.S.-Russian nuclear security cooperation is dead, however, is greatly exaggerated.
The CTR Agreement was conceived and implemented in a very different time. The Soviet Union had disintegrated and Russia was financially supine. U.S. assistance was necessary to keep body and soul together for Russian nuclear weapons scientists, and to remove the temptation for them to sell their knowledge and wares to other nations or terrorists. In the absence of Soviet oppression, the Russian nuclear archipelago was a security nightmare, with fallen fences, crumbling buildings, poor procedures, and a demoralized (and all too often drunken) guard force. Championed by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, and signed by President George H. W. Bush, the Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation created programs to detect, secure, and dispose of dangerous nuclear material in Russia and the former Soviet Union, as well as to facilitate the destruction of missiles and chemical weapons.
Today, Russia is more prosperous and its nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities are much more secure. Work under the Bratislava Initiative, agreed to by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in 2005, essentially completed physical security upgrades at nuclear weapons facilities in Russia. Fissile material production reactors at Seversk and Zheleznogorsk were shut down and replaced with coal-fired plants. Hundreds of Russian ports, airports, and border crossings are now equipped with nuclear detection equipment. Over 400 metric tons of Russian highly enriched uranium has been down-blended to fuel reactors that now provide 10 percent of American electricity. Nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus have been removed to Russia, and the former Soviet nuclear test site at Degelen Mountain in Kazakhstan has been secured from scavengers. Moscow and Washington, among others, should be proud of these signal achievements.