Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union: Leadership and Synergies

LEADERSHIP AND SYNERGIES

Bunn, Matthew, and John P. Holdren. "Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union." Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 22 (1997): 403-486.

This article outlines a wide array of major projects, each with its own complexities and issues, whose completion will stretch for years into the future and require the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. (Table 3 outlines the currently allocated and requested US funding for the programs described in this article.) In implementing any such program, it is essential to prioritize the key objectives, coordinate the efforts closely, and seize opportunities for synergies between different parts of the program.

A consistent theme of many of the studies of these subjects has been that implementing this complex array of projects will require stronger support and more active leadership from both the executive and legislative branches in both the United States and Russia than has been available to date (see e.g. 8, 10). Currently, there is no high-level official in the US government whose mandate is principally focused on securing nuclear warheads and materials and achieving monitored reductions in nuclear warhead and fissile material stockpiles, and high-level attention to these issues has been intermittent at best. In 1996, in legislation originated by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), and Pete Domenici (R-NM), Congress mandated the establishment of a national coordinator covering a broad portfolio including all aspects of nonproliferation, as well as related terrorism and organized crime issues. (That mandate was almost certainly too broad for such a coordinator to be effective in the absence of a substantial staff.) Ultimately the original language was modified so that a reorganization of the government's management of these issues was no longer required and it became legally possible to simply designate the existing Deputy National Security Advisor as the mandated coordinator, which is the approach the Clinton Administration has chosen to take (for the text of the final version, see 127). It remains to be seen whether this approach will be sufficient to carry out the monumental tasks involved in carrying this agenda to fruition. Energetic and high-level leadership will be required to keep these issues at the front of the agenda with Russia and other relevant countries, to defend the budgets of these growing programs in Congress (where many legislators continue to see these programs as "foreign aid" rather than as investments in US security), and to coordinate and integrate the broad range of efforts now under way.

All of the efforts described in this article can and should reinforce each other. Technologies and institutional relationships developed in the course of upgrading MPC&A will also contribute to building transparency. Data exchanges and reciprocal visits carried out under the transparency program will provide useful information for the effort to upgrade MPC&A. Storage and disposition of excess plutonium and HEU will inevitably be integrally linked. New businesses for the nuclear cities will inevitably include efforts in all these areas, including fissile material disposition, production of MPC&A equipment, and the like.

In particular, the large sums of money involved in the HEU purchase can provide substantial leverage for accomplishing other nuclear security objectives, and this needs to be carefully considered. Looked at in isolation, raising the billion dollars or more that might be required to finance plutonium disposition in Russia might seem extremely difficult. But, as one example, the Western countries could agree to purchase another 100 tons of HEU— a 20% addition to the 500-ton deal already underway— linked to an approach for using the proceeds to finance disposition of Russia's excess weapons plutonium (for a detailed proposal for setting up a Russian-Western joint venture financed by such an arrangement, see 128). The idea of offering to purchase HEU more quickly or in larger quantities if Russia agrees to take certain steps that are in US interests has not yet been pursued (14).

Table 3: US funding related to control of plutonium and HEU in the former Soviet Union (in millions) a

a Source: Budget figures provided by DOD, DOE, and State Department officials (rounded to nearest million). Figures include only US government funding for programs in the former Soviet Union, not funding from other countries, private funding, or US government funding for programs primarily within the United States. In many cases, funding figures for former Soviet programs represent a fraction of a larger overall program (for example, the overall US budget for fissile material storage and disposition is over $100 million for both years, of which $10 million is devoted to Russian cooperation). Question marks represent FY 1998 allocations not yet determined by agencies; dashes represent initiatives not yet involving significant funding.
b These funds were authorized in FY 1995, but are still available and are now being spent.
c This includes $10 million in the DOD budget and $3.5 million in the DOE budget.
d Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.