Congressional Record, Volume 147 Issue 174 (Friday, December 14, 2001)

[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 174 (Friday, December 14, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13280-S13286]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

NATIONAL SECURITY

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I found in the current issue of the
National Journal a very important article entitled ``Nuclear
Nightmares,'' by James Kitfield, who has written knowledgeably in the
past about matters of national security, and particularly those
involving nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction.
I want to place this article by James Kitfield into the Record. I ask
unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the Article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

[From the National Journal, Dec. 14, 2001]

Nuclear Nightmares

(By James Kitfield)

[[Page S13281]]

military at least partly over his strident support for arms
control and his opposition to development of the much more
powerful hydrogen bomb. The scientists at Los Alamos
developed and help train and man the Energy Department's
secretive Nuclear Emergency Search Teams that for 30 years
have stood poised to respond to the threat of nuclear terror
or the smuggling of a nuclear weapon onto U.S. soil.
Most important, the scientists at the Los Alamos, Sandia,
and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories helped devise a
U.S. nuclear doctrine designed to strictly limit the spread
of nuclear weapons and technology, and to render their use
unthinkable through the dynamic tension of ``mutually assured
destruction.'' And for the past decade, they have watched
with growing concern as unpredictable world events have
repeatedly tested the tolerances of that careful calculation
and narrowed its margins for error.

Weakened Security

The breakup of the former Soviet Union, followed by the
fundamental restructuring of a Russian society that accounted
for the world's largest stockpile of both nuclear weapons and
the fissile material necessary to make them, created a gaping
hole of vulnerability in terms of nuclear proliferation. U.S.
experts concede that hole remains open to this day.
``We've been worried about Russia for 10 years, because
initially the Russians insisted they didn't need any help
securing their weapons and nuclear material, which was a
ludicrous assertion,'' Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow and
former longtime director of Los Alamos National Laboratory,
told National Journal. ``The Russians simply failed to take
into account how dramatically their country had changed with
the breakup of the Soviet Union. With the evolution toward an
open society, the old Soviet security system based on guns,
guards, and gulags was simply not good enough anymore. So
we've spent a lot of time educating the Russians about the
gaps in their own security system, and I still don't think
the Russian leadership fully appreciates just how real the
continued vulnerabilities are in the Russian nuclear
complex.''
On top of Russian instability has come the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism particularly the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, which has--or had, until recent weeks--strong
links with the government of Pakistan, an emerging nuclear
power. Pakistan's detention of two of its nuclear
scientists for suspected connections to Osama bin Laden
and his Al Qaeda network, and recent news reports
suggesting previously undisclosed contacts between other
Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and Al Qaeda, underscore
the difficulty such societies have in safeguarding their
nuclear secrets in times of extreme turmoil.
John Immele, a deputy director of Los Alamos, said: ``The
biggest security threat in terms of nuclear weapons or
expertise falling into the wrong hands has always been the
``inside job,'' because it short-circuits so many of the
traditional barriers to nuclear proliferation. From that
standpoint, the threat to the Pakistani government from
Islamic fundamentalists, and the close ties between
fundamentalists inside the government and Pakistan's nuclear
weapons program, are obviously causes for concern. If a
terrorist group were to get its hands on nuclear fissile
material,'' he said, ``the main impediment to making a bomb
would be to find an expert to assemble it. As cases
concerning Pakistani and some Russian nuclear scientists in
the past have shown, there are an increasing number of
nuclear experts out there, and some find themselves in
desperate circumstances. That's one more way the bar to a
terrorist group acquiring a nuclear device has dropped.''
Perhaps the greatest disruption to the equilibrium of the
nuclear ``balance of terror'' is the emergence of criminal
and terrorist organizations with a level of power and
technological sophistication once associated only with
nation-states. Should Al Qaeda or another one of these
terrorist groups with global reach succeed in acquiring
nuclear weapons, experts say, it would turn on its head a
nuclear doctrine that is based on the deterrent value of
mutually assured destruction. Doomsday cults or religious
zealots bent on martyrdom may not care much about traditional
theories of deterrence.
Roger Hagengruber, the senior vice president for national
security at Sandia, has spent much of his career
contemplating the threat of nuclear terror. ``For 50 years,
the United States has closely watched various terrorist
organizations for telltale indications that they might become
a nuclear threat,'' he told National Journal. Possible
warning signs include evidence of state sponsorship, a
display of rapidly increasing technological sophistication,
or persistent attempts to acquire materials or expertise
associated with nuclear weapons.
``The reason we've been so concerned about Al Qaeda for
some time is because all the warning indicators are
positive,'' Hagengruber said, citing bin Laden's statements
that acquiring nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction
was a ``religious duty'' for Muslims, and intelligence
reports of persistent attempts by Al Qaeda operatives to
acquire nuclear fissile material. `'You have a large,
seemingly well-funded terrorist organization that has
persisted over a long period of time. They have operated with
either direct or indirect state support in a region of the
world where the security infrastructure guarding nuclear
materials is under significant stress. And they have an
unprecedented degree of enmity toward the United States. I
still think it's relatively unlikely that bin Laden actually
acquired a crude nuclear weapon, or even significant amounts
of weapons-grade fissile material, but that is not a set of
circumstances that engenders either confidence or
complacency. The consequences of being wrong or not paying
the requisite attention are just too catastrophic.''

Suitcase Bombs

Even a brief visit to the National Atomic Museum at the
Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., reveals
the degree to which the nuclear flame threatened to become a
wildfire during the arms race of the 1950s and `60s. On
display are full-scale models of both of the original nuclear
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ``Little Boy'' and
``Fat Man,'' and a mockup of a Titan II intercontinental
ballistic missile with multiple thermonuclear warheads,
arguably the most fearsome weapon ever devised. In between
sit replicas of virtually every nuclear weapon designed at
Los Alamos and fielded by the U.S. military: nuclear air-to-
air missiles, atomic mines, atomic depth charges and
torpedoes, nuclear artillery shells--even the equivalent of
an atomic bazooka to put atom-splitting destructiveness into
the hands of the U.S. infantry.
Implied by this exhibit of nuclear inventiveness run amok,
but not on display at the museum, are perhaps the least-
talked-about of all nuclear weapons--portable atomic
demolition charges, or nuclear ``suitcase bombs.''
Speculation has been heated, although unsubstantiated, that
Al Qaeda may have acquired such weapons from the former
Soviet arsenal.
Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, a former Russian national security
adviser, sparked the speculation in 1997 when he told CBS's
60 Minutes that the Russian military had lost track of more
than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons, out of a total
arsenal of some 250. The Russian atomic energy commission
denied the report--and even the existence of such weapons--
and Lebed later seemed to back away from his own assertions.
However, other Russian experts have confirmed the reality of
such bombs. For instance, the Los Angeles Times recently
quoted Russian START II negotiator Nikolai Sokov as saying
the suitcase bombs existed but speculating that they have
been dismantled. Russian scientist Alexei Yablokov, a former
member of the Russian National Security Council, told
Congress that the suitcase nukes were actually controlled by
the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence service, and were
thus outside the inventory-accounting system of the Russian
military.
Yossef Bodansky, the director of the U.S. Congressional
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,
heightened concerns over the Russian suitcase bombs. Citing
unnamed intelligence sources in his 2000 book, Bin Laden: The
Man Who Declared War on America, Bodansky claimed: ``Although
there is debate over the precise quantities of weapons
purchased, there is no longer much doubt that bin Laden has
finally succeeded in his quest for nuclear suitcase bombs.
Bin Laden's emissaries paid the Chechens $30 million in cash,
and gave them two tons of Afghan heroin worth about $70
million'' for the bombs. Bodansky's book seemed to lend
credence to bin Laden's assertion in a recent interview that
Al Qaeda possessed nuclear weapons as a ``deterrent.''
Nuclear experts at Sandia and Los Alamos confirm that both
the Soviet Union and the United States developed portable
nuclear weapons. The U.S. weapon is the MK-54 Small Atomic
Demolition Munition. Given the stringent security systems
that nuclear states create to guard such weapons, however,
the scientists consider the threat of loose mini-nukes as the
least likely of all nuclear terror threats.
``Every state that has ever created a nuclear arsenal has
come to a sobering realization of what it possesses, and has
established extraordinary levels of security to protect those
weapons,'' said Hagengruber of Sandia. ``So while we can
never dismiss the possibility of a stolen Russian nuclear
weapon, that would be extremely difficult to accomplish, and
the Russian president would almost certainly know about such
a theft immediately.''
Immele of Los Alamos concurs. ``There is no question that
both the United States and the Russians developed suitcase-
sized atomic demolition munitions,'' he said. ``We studied
Lebed's comments very closely and compared them to our
extensive knowledge about what the Russian military has done
to account for its nuclear weapons, however, and we have no
intelligence leading us to believe that those weapons have
escaped Russian control. What you find is that even a country
with 25,000 nuclear weapons and a less-than-state-of-the-art
accounting system will keep a very close accounting and
jealously guard control of its actual nuclear weapons.''
However, he cautioned, ``nuclear materials and expertise are
much harder to account for and keep track of, which is why so
much of our concerns about Russia are focused on its nuclear
fissile material and scientists.''

DOOMSDAY INGREDIENTS

Most analysts cite as a success story the joint U.S.-
Russian programs designed to rid the former Soviet states of
their nuclear

[[Page S13282]]

weapons, and to help Russia secure and dismantle its own
weapons. The United States has spent roughly $4 billion on
the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program (named
for legislative co-sponsors former Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and
Richard Lugar, R-Ind.). To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has
deactivated 5,700 nuclear warheads, destroyed 434 ICBMs and
483 air-to-surface missiles, and eliminated hundreds of
Russian bombers, submarines, and missile launchers.
However, attempts to consolidate and safeguard the much
larger Russian stockpile of nuclear fissile material--the
essential ingredient of these doomsday weapons--have had a
more checkered record. Indeed, the first indication that
Russia might be leaking lethal nuclear material from its
increasingly decrepit inventory came as early as 1992, when a
Russian was caught attempting to steal 1.5 kilograms of
highly enriched uranium from a facility in Podolsk. Other
incidents soon followed. In March 1993, authorities in St.
Petersburg seized 6.6 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from
smugglers. In August 1994, police in Munich, Germany, seized
360 grams of plutonium and 5 pounds of uranium, part of a
shipment apparently stolen from a nuclear research center in
Obninsk, Russia. In one of the most worrisome incidents, an
anonymous tip enabled the Czech police to seize 2.7 kilograms
of highly enriched uranium in December 1994.
Because nuclear experts consider the difficulty of
acquiring weapons-grade fissile material as the single
greatest impediment to a group or nation that wants to build
nuclear weapons, these seizures sounded a loud wake-up call.
The theft of significant amounts of uranium is particularly
frightening because uranium can be used as the key ingredient
in relatively rudimentary nuclear devices that experts
consider most within the technological grasp of fledgling
nuclear states or terrorist groups.
The Energy Department's efforts, under its ``Lab-to-Lab''
initiative, to protect Russia's stockpile of fissile material
have encountered severe obstacles. One is the continuing
Russian reluctance to open its secret nuclear cities and
research facilities to prying Western eyes. The second has
been the unwillingness of both Russian and American
authorities to acknowledge the vast scope of the problem of
securing the enormous Russian stockpile of fissile material.
``I think it's fair to say that the Russians themselves
didn't have a complete handle on the quantities and scattered
locations that made up their fissile-material stockpile,''
said Kent Biringer, who works on cooperative international
programs at Sandia. ``As we started out on these programs, we
didn't have a solid baseline from which to work that told us
what we were trying to get our arms around.''
When the true size of the Russian stockpile eventually came
into clearer focus, U.S. officials realized they had greatly
underestimated the challenge. Richard Wallace, the program
manager for material protection, control, and accounting in
the Russian Nonproliferation Program at Los Alamos, said:
``What we found was that Russia had produced roughly 10 times
more nuclear fissile material during the Cold War than the
United States, and they had it scattered at many more sites.
They also had 10 secret nuclear cities,'' Wallace said, ``and
each one dwarfed one of our comparable nuclear weapons
laboratories. The Russians also had to go through a major
cultural change in how they thought about security at their
stockpile sites.''
Eventually, U.S. experts were able to estimate that Russia
had a total of 850 metric tons of weapons-usable missile
material--enough for more than 70,000 nuclear weapons--
stored at 95 separate sites. Because it takes only about
17.5 pounds of plutonium or 55 pounds of enriched uranium
to make a nuclear bomb, securing that vast trove of
fissile material became one of the United States' top
nonproliferation priorities of the 1990s.
The lax security systems at some of those Russian sites
have become legendary within the weapons-lab community.
Security experts talk about perimeter fences with gaping
holes; fissile material stored in unguarded boxes in hallways
of poorly guarded facilities; and facilities without air
conditioning, where windows without bars were routinely kept
open to ease the summer heat. According to experts at Los
Alamos, managers of Russian nuclear reactors also routinely
set aside extra stashes of plutonium and uranium ``off the
books'' to make up for potential shortfalls in their
production quotas at the end of each accounting period.
U.S. experts thus focused in the early years of the Lab-to-
Lab program on rudimentary fixes such as consolidating
fissile material at fewer sites, and protecting it with
radiation detectors, closed-circuit television camera
systems, electronic sensors on perimeter fences, and
computerized accounting systems. Even some of these
relatively simple fixes went awry. U.S. experts discovered,
for instance, that the batteries in some of their security
systems failed in the harsh Siberian winters. Levels of
radiation dust and radiation contamination on workers that
were considered routine at some Russian facilities often set
off U.S. radiation detectors.
Today, U.S. experts at Los Alamos estimate that roughly 570
tons of Russia's total 850 tons of weapons-usable material
are more secure as a result of the security upgrades. They
concede, however, that more than 200 tons of fissile material
remain largely unsecured. A May 2000 report by the General
Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, found that
U.S. officials have yet to gain access to 104 of 252 nuclear
sites ``requiring improved security systems.''
``There is still a lot of room for improvement in securing
Russia's fissile materials,'' according to Larry Walker, the
manager of Cooperative International Programs at Sandia.
``What you find is, the closer you get to Russia's actual
nuclear weapons, the more secretive and less willing to give
access the Russians become. Access remains an issue, because
it's difficult to improve security unless you can actually
see a storage site and witness how things are stored and
handled.''

stalled progress

After making significant headway in the early years, the
U.S.-Russian cooperative programs to secure Moscow's fissile-
material stockpile got stock in 1998 and have not yet
recovered. The reasons for the lagging progress are varied,
experts say. As the materials protection program grew in cost
from a few million dollars to more than $100 million
annually, Congress and Administration officials began
demanding a higher level of access to Russian nuclear
facilities, and the Russians balked. A bureaucracy that had
been thrown into disarray by the dissolution of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s also began to reassert itself,
throwing up red-tape barriers to greater Western access. And
the Russians angered the United States by insisting on
exporting a civilian nuclear reactor to Iran. The State
Department lists Iran as the most active state sponsor of
terrorist groups in the world.
Political tensions over the bombing of Serbia, NATO
expansion, and a U.S. national missile defense system also
soured relations between senior American and Russian
officials in the late 1990s. Finally, because of a financial
collapse in 1998, many Russian nuclear scientists and
technicians were not paid for months at a time, raising fears
that they would peddle their expertise on the world market.
The Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, for instance, was
known to have actively recruited Russian nuclear design
specialists, and even student physicists from Moscow State
University, in an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.
``After making enormous progress in the first three to four
years, our cooperative programs with the Russians basically
ground to a halt, and I don't think many officials in the
Bush Administration still understand just how broken this
process now is,'' said Hecker, the former director of Los
Alamos. ``Partly because the U.S. government lost its way and
switched from an approach of cooperation to one that dictated
an unnecessarily intrusive level of access into sensitive
Russian facilities, we've lost the spirit of partnership
necessary to make these programs work. Couple that with the
fact that the Clinton Administration never really had a
strategic vision or overarching strategy for dealing with the
Russian nuclear complex and setting priorities among all
these various programs, and you have a process that has
essentially ground to a standstill in many respects. And
until we can restore a common sense of purpose between us and
the Russians, no amount of money will fix the Russian nuclear
security problems.''
Meanwhile, indications of serious Russian security lapses
continue. Russian officials in 1998 broke up a conspiracy by
employees of a major nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk
region of the Ural Mountains to steal 18.5 kilograms of
weapons-usable material. The Center for Nonproliferation
Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies
has documented 11 cases involving diversion and recovery of
Russian weapons-grade material between 1992 and 1997. The
International Atomic Energy Agency further documents six
seizures of weapons-grade material linked to states of the
former Soviet Union between 1999 and 2001. Four Russian
sailors were arrested at a base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in
January 2000, with radioactive materials that they were
suspected of stealing from a Russian nuclear submarine.
According to a New York Times report, Turkey recently
revealed that its undercover police had broken up a smuggling
ring holding 2.2 pounds of what appeared to be enriched
uranium, brought from a Russian of Azeri origin. The head of
the Russian agency responsible for nuclear security recently
told reporters that, on two occasions last year, terrorists
had staked out Russian nuclear facilities. Earlier this
month, on December 6, Russian police arrested members of a
criminal gang who were trying to sell uranium for $30,000.
Reports coming in a steady drumbeat from U.S. commissions
and blue-ribbon panels have warned that the inadequate
security of the fissile-material stockpile of the former
Soviet union remains a glaring weakness in the global system
designed to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. A 1997 Defense
Science Board Study noted: ``Defense planners are
increasingly concerned about possible state and non-state use
of radiological dispersal devices [dirty bombs] against U.S.
forces and population centers abroad and at home, as
technological barriers have fallen and radiological materials
have become more plentiful.'' A 1999 congressional commission
chaired by former CIA Director John Deutch and Sen. Arlen
Specter, R-Pa., warned that power outages, inadequate
inventory control, and unpaid Russian guards and technicians
had all increased the threat of an ``insider'' diversion of
Russian nuclear fissile material.

[[Page S13283]]

Perhaps the starkest warning was issued earlier this year
by an Energy Department advisory group headed by former Sen.
Howard Baker, R-Tenn., and former White House counsel Lloyd
Cutler. ``The most urgent unmet national security threat to
the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass
destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be
stolen or sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states,'' the
Baker-Cutler study concluded. The group recommended that the
United States spend $30 billion over the next eight to 10
years on a crash program to finally secure Russia's weapons
of mass destruction and its stockpile of fissile material.
Ominously, the steady stream of warnings in recent years
resembles similar unheeded alarms raised before September 11
about the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Nonproliferation advocates were thus dismayed that the Bush
Administration's fiscal 2002 budget proposed cutting the
Pentagon's Nunn-Lugar programs by 9 percent (from $443.4
million in fiscal 2001 to $403 million), and the Energy
Department's nonproliferation programs by 11.5 percent (from
$872.4 million in fiscal 2001 to about $773.7 million).
Congress has since moved to restore some of the proposed
funding cuts, however. And in a December 11 speech at the
Citadel, Bush promised expanded efforts and increased funding
for securing Russian fissile material and for finding
peaceful employment for Russian nuclear scientists.
In an attempt to jump-start the stalled threat-reduction
programs, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph r. Biden
Jr., D-Del., and Lugar recently introduced the Debt Reduction
for Non-Proliferation Act, which would forgive Russia's debt
of $3.7 billion to the United States in exchange for its
cooperation with U.S. efforts to secure and monitor Russian
weapons of mass destruction and fissile material.
``Time after time, the United States has put together
groups of objective, bipartisan policy experts to study this
problem, and each time, they have concluded that this is an
urgent national security issue--and every time, their reports
are ignored,'' said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the
Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington. Part of the problem, he
says, is that such programs have no natural domestic
constituency in Russia, and in the United States they smack
of unpopular foreign aid. And because cooperative threat-
reduction programs do not command the same priority within
the Administration as missile defense, they can easily get
shoved off the summit-level agenda.
``Another problem is, this seems like a distant threat
because nothing terrible has happened yet,'' Cirincione said.
``The general feeling among experts, however, is that we've
been lucky so far. There is absolutely no doubt that there
are bad people out there trying very hard to get their hands
on Russian weapons of mass destruction and nuclear materials,
and if we don't secure the source, sooner or later they will
succeed. After September 11, the once-inconceivable is now
all too easily imagined.''

An Unseen Hand

A decade's worth of seizures and the breakup of numerous
smuggling rings in Russia and Europe clearly point to a
lucrative black market in nuclear fissile materials. No one
knows with any certainty whether terrorists have successfully
smuggled any of that material through the porous southern
Russian border into Central Asia or nearby Afghanistan. Few
intelligence experts doubt, however, that one of the unseen
hands creating the demand for fissile material was that of
Osama bin Laden.
The most unambiguous testimony to date on Al Qaeda's
methodical, well-financed campaign to acquire nuclear bomb-
making material came from Ahmed Al-Fadl, an Al Qaeda
operative who turned state's witness in the trial earlier
this year of men accused of bombing two U.S. embassies in
East Africa in 1998. Al-Fadl claimed he was the middleman in
a mid-1990s deal between Al Qaeda and Sudanese officials for
the purchase of $1.5 million worth of highly enriched
uranium, apparently diverted from South Africa's former
nuclear program. Though Al-Fadl was not present for the final
exchange, his testimony convinced U.S. prosecutors that ``at
least since 1993, bid Laden and others made efforts to obtain
components of nuclear weapons.''
Recent years have yielded a steady stream of news reports
and intelligence leaks about Al Qaeda's attempts to acquire
fissile material. In 1998, for instance, bid Laden aide
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was arrested in Munich and charged with
acting on behalf of Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear materials. As
The Christian Science Monitor recently reported, a Bulgarian
businessman claimed to have met bin Laden himself last year
to talk over a complex deal to transship nuclear materials
across Bulgaria to Afghanistan.
Pakistan, meanwhile, continues to detain Sultan Bashiruddin
Mahmood and a second nuclear scientist considered key to
Pakistan's nuclear program. Mahmood has reportedly
acknowledged meeting bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammed
Omar during at least three visits to Afghanistan last year,
and he is said to have talked at length about developing
nuclear and biological weapons. According to the New York
Times, CIA Director George J. Tenet, during his recent trip
to Pakistan, raised U.S. concerns about additional contacts
between Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and Al Qaeda.
If the Al Qaeda network has successfully acquired enough
weapons-grade uranium, U.S. experts say the group's last
major challenge in eventually constructing a workable nuclear
bomb would be to entice a trained nuclear scientist to
spearhead the project. ``The history of nuclear programs
suggest that they depend on only a few key, knowledgeable
scientists, with sufficient time and bankrolling, to bring a
program to fruition,'' said Biringer of Sandia. ``That's why
we have focused a lot of effort on trying to retrain Russian
scientists in other disciplines so they will not attempt to
sell their services on the open market.''
U.S. experts say that Russian nuclear scientists are
generally much better off today than in 1998, when they went
unpaid for up to eight months because of a financial crisis
and the collapse of the ruble. Nevertheless, they worry that
Energy's ``Nuclear Cities Initiative,'' designed to retrain
Russian scientists and shrink the Russian nuclear complex,
has suffered from erratic funding and tepid congressional
support.
``Virtually all Russian scientists we have dealt with are
enormously loyal and patriotic, and most of them would like
to stay where they are and continue to conduct meaningful
work and research,'' Hagengruber said. ``So we are not
worried about Russian hemorrhaging nuclear scientists. These
scientists remain one of our major concerns, however--because
unfortunately, all it takes is enough fissile material and
one or two good scientists to create a real problem. Even a
99 percent solution is not really good enough.''
Experts at Los Alamos and Sandia doubt that Al Qaeda has
had the requisite time, weapons-grade fissile material, and
nuclear expertise to actually construct a crude nuclear
weapon, though they would not rule the possibility out. One
expert who concurs in those doubts is Iraqi defector Khidhir
Hamza who headed Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear bomb program
through the mid-1990s and co-authored the book, Saddam's
Bombmaker. Despite obvious weaknesses in global nuclear
nonproliferation defenses, Hamza insists that the
difficulties inherent in constructing a nuclear weapon remain
daunting.
``We in Iraq were in the market for nuclear materials, and
not a week passed without us getting an offer from somebody
to sell us such materials,'' he told CNBC's Geraldo Rivera on
October 26. ``People came to Baghdad with bags of samples,
and left with bags of money, and we never got any serious
nuclear materials. Despite what people say, the [protections
of such materials] are not that loose, and this radioactive
material is very difficult to transport.'' As for actually
constructing a nuclear bomb, ``that's not that easy either,''
Hamza said. ``Iraq is a country with thousands of nuclear
workers, and we still couldn't get a bomb ready in time for
the Gulf War''
U.S. experts are much less skeptical that Al Qaeda or
another terrorist organization could build a dirty bomb by
packing a conventional explosive with fissile material that
would kill and injure, mainly through radioactive dispersal
and contamination. On the spectrum of nuclear threats,
experts consider this a ``high-likelihood, low-lethality''
scenario.
Bruce Blair, an arms control expert and former nuclear
missileer who is now the president of the Center for Defense
Information in Washington, said: ``There's almost no credible
evidence that Al Qaeda acquired a portable nuclear device
that could actually split the atom, but I think it's very
plausible that bin Laden acquired fissile material that could
be wrapped around dynamite and exploded in an urban center
like Lower Manhattan to cause panic and terror, and require
the evacuation of large portions of the city for a
considerable period of time.''
According to Blair, the Defense Department ran an analysis
of just such a worst-case scenario involving a dirty bomb
made with 50 kilograms of nuclear power plant spent fuel
packed around 100 pounds of conventional explosives. ``The
calculation was that lethal doses of radiation would be
dispersed over roughly a half-mile area, leading to hundreds,
if not thousands, of casualties,'' Blair said. ``There is
also considerable data on what would be involved in cleaning
up after such a terrorist attack, and that dates back to
1966, when an Air Force plane carrying nuclear weapons
crashed in Spain.''
Indeed, a display at Sandia's National Atomic Museum
depicts the collision of a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker during
midair refueling over Palomares, Spain, on January 17, 1966.
Photos document how three thermonuclear weapons that burst
open in the crash contaminated a 285-acre area with highly
enriched plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years.
More than 4,000 Air Force personnel were drafted into the
cleanup effort, which required plowing hundreds of acres and
removing 4,810 barrels of plutonium-contaminated earth to a
storage site in South Carolina. In 2001 dollars, the cleanup
operation cost $230 million.
In a post-September 11 world, a Palomares-type incident
occupies the ``high-likelihood, low-lethality'' end of the
spectrum of threats to U.S. national security. Such a
classification is a testament to the almost unthinkable
menace posed by nuclear-armed terrorists.

Mr. LUGAR. I wish to quote liberally from what I think are remarkable
summaries of some very tough decisions that we will need to make. The
author begins:

[[Page S13284]]

The recent disclosure that documents about nuclear bombs
and radiological ``dirty bombs'' had been found at captured
Al Qaeda terrorist network facilities in Kabul, Afghanistan,
immediately triggered alarms among the nuclear scientists who
work atop the high desert mesas in this remote region of New
Mexico. For more than 50 years, nuclear experts at Los Alamos
and at nearby Sandia National Laboratories have studied
terrorist and criminal groups for any signs that they were on
the verge of cracking the nuclear code first broken here.
Everything they knew about Al Qaeda told them that these
terrorists might be drawing too close to a terrible
discovery.
Indeed, ever since members of the Manhattan Project tested
the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945, scientists at
Los Alamos have been the pre-eminent keepers of the nuclear
flame. When the former Soviet Union created the secret
nuclear city ``Arzamas-16'' as the birthplace of its own
atomic bomb, it hewed closely to the Los Alamos blueprint. So
much so, in fact, that Russian residents later jokingly
referred to their town as ``Los Arzamas.''
Almost from the inception of the nuclear age, no one
understood better the apocalyptic threat of these weapons
than the nuclear scientists who made them.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan
Project and the father of the atomic bomb, eventually fell
out of favor with the U.S. military at least partly over his
strident support for arms control and his opposition to
development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb. The
scientists at Los Alamos developed and help train and man the
Energy Department's secretive Nuclear Emergency Search Teams
that for 30 years have stood poised to respond to the threat
of nuclear terror or the smuggling of a nuclear weapon onto
U.S. soil.
Most important, the scientists at the Los Alamos, Sandia,
and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories helped devise a
U.S. nuclear doctrine designed to strictly limit the spread
of nuclear weapons and technology, and to render their use
unthinkable through the dynamic tension of ``mutually assured
destruction.'' And for the past decade, they watched with
growing concern as unpredictable world events have repeatedly
tested the tolerances of that careful calculation and
narrowed its margins for error.
The breakup of the former Soviet Union, followed by the
fundamental restructuring of a Russian society that accounted
for the world's largest stockpile of both nuclear weapons and
the fissile material necessary to make them, created a gaping
hole of vulnerability in terms of nuclear proliferation. U.S.
experts concede that that hole remains open to this day.
``We've been worried about Russia for 10 years, because
initially the Russians insisted they didn't need any help
securing their weapons and nuclear material, which was a
ludicrous assertion,'' said Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow
and former longtime director of Los Alamos National
Laboratory. . . .

Mr. Hecker continues:

``The Russians simply failed to take into account how
dramatically their country had changed with the breakup of
the Soviet Union. With the evolution toward an open society,
the old Soviet security system based on guns, guards, and
gulags was simply not good enough anymore. So we've spent a
lot of time educating the Russians about the gaps in their
own security system, and I still don't think the Russian
leadership fully appreciates just how real the continued
vulnerabilities are in the Russian nuclear complex.''
On top of this Russian instability has come the rise now of
Islamic fundamentalism, particularly the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, which has--or had, until recent weeks--strong
links with the government of Pakistan, an emerging nuclear
power. Pakistan's detention of two of its nuclear scientists
for suspected connections to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
network, and most recent news reports suggesting previously
undisclosed contacts between other Pakistani nuclear weapons
experts and Al Qaeda, underscore the difficulty such
societies have in safeguarding their nuclear secrets in time
of extreme turmoil.
John Immele, a deputy director of Los Alamos, said: ``The
biggest security threat in terms of nuclear weapons or
expertise falling into the wrong hands has always been the
`inside job,' because it short-circuits so many of the
traditional barriers to nuclear proliferation. From that
standpoint, the threat to the Pakistani government from
Islamic fundamentalists, and the close ties between
fundamentalists inside the government and Pakistan's nuclear
program, are obviously causes for concern. If a terrorist
group were to get its hands on nuclear fissile material,'' he
said, ``the main impediment to making a bomb would be to
find an expert to assemble it. As cases concerning
Pakistani and some Russian nuclear scientists in the past
have shown, there are an increasing number of nuclear
experts out there, and some find themselves in desperate
circumstances. . . .
Perhaps the greatest disruption to the equilibrium of the
nuclear ``balance of terror'' is the emergence of criminal
and terrorist organizations with a level of power and
technological sophistication once associated only with
nation-states.

Quoting again from James Kitfield:

Should Al Qaeda or another one of these terrorist groups
with global reach succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons,
experts say, it would turn on its head a nuclear doctrine
that is based on the deterrent value of mutually assured
destruction. Doomsday cults or religion zealots bent on
martyrdom may not care much for traditional theories of
deterrence.

Mr. President, in a piece in the Washington Post published from my
writings last week, I tried to say the bottom line I thought in this
war was the search for al-Qaida and then nuclear cells wherever they
may be in many countries where such have been identified. That is
critical and that continues even as we speak with important American
forces and a broad coalition.
The second path is equally, if not more, crucially important, and
that is as weapons of mass destruction or materials that might produce
weapons of mass destruction are identified in various countries, U.S.
policy, and hopefully the alliance policy, must be, first, to gain
accountability and transparency as to what there is, and, secondly, to
work with each of those countries to make sure that material is secure,
not an invasion of a sovereignty, and I mentioned Pakistan and India in
my article in particular because these are very vital cases in the area
we are now talking about, Afghanistan.
We offer, I hope, some assistance to make certain, first of all,
those Governments know what they have; that it is secure; that if they
do not have the money, the United States and others may work with them,
and likewise with the security apparatus, which has become a part of
our experience and, to a great extent, the Russian experience.
And finally, we encourage, whenever possible, and maybe even help
finance, the destruction of this material or those weapons.
The opening up of those societies may not be easy. So as people talk
about the next step, the next step is essentially attempting to define
who will cooperate. I have no way of knowing whether our new friendship
with India and Pakistan will lead us to believe they might be more
cooperative than they would have been prior to September 11, but that
is possible.
The stories about Pakistan's own striving to bring about security,
its placement, as press reports give it, in six different locations,
even a very far stretch of the imagination that the Chinese might be
entrusted as trustees for it to get it out of harm's way in the event
Pakistan was in harm's way, indicates how serious this is.
The question comes: What about situations in which there may be less
cooperation? We do not know for certain what Libya has or if the
Syrians are involved. We have strong beliefs that Iran and Iraq have
been very active. And what if there is not cooperation with the
international community, either the United Nations inspections teams or
anybody else's inspections teams?
This is why the war against terrorism is likely to have some life to
it beyond Afghanistan because there clearly is, in my judgment, a need
to make certain this intersection does not occur. It is easy enough to
read the paragraph I have just read, but clearly I think it has come
into the purview of our policymakers that mutually assured destruction
may or may not have been the guiding post between the United States and
Russia. It apparently is not going to be the way we will proceed in the
future, and the President and others have said we are on a different
course of cooperation. But it did serve as a deterrent for a long time
as thousands of nuclear warheads were aimed at us, and we had thousands
aimed at the Russians.
Now the problem is, as we take a look at the aircraft going into the
World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, mutually assured destruction
does not seem to pertain to that kind of arrangement. Suicidal missions
do not take into consideration mutually assured destruction, in part
because those who committed suicide destroyed themselves.

There are no assets back in a home country of governmental buildings,
headquarters, utilities. What is there to destroy? What is the
downside? This, of course, is the problem, that those with the suicidal
tendency who have their hands on the materials, the weapons, for
whatever reasons--religiously based, zealotry--decide to create havoc
in the world and could do so in a monstrous way.

[[Page S13285]]

I continue with a bit more of Mr. Kitfield's analysis. It appears to
me when he says the consequences of being wrong or not paying attention
to these matters is catastrophic--we have been down the trail in
various ways. Take a look at suitcase bombs. General Lebed of Russia
came over and suggested that it may or may not confirm his point of
view. But never the less, the Los Alamos people are taking a look at
Lebed's contentions and those of others who have said ``nuclear
materials and expertise are much harder to account for'' than bombs,
even suitcases, anything encased. That is why ``concerns about Russia
are focused on fissile material and its scientists.''
The problem is now it appears Russia produced a great deal more
fissile material than we anticipated. So much more that the destruction
of it or even the securing of it has gone well beyond all of our best
attempts. Mr. Kitfield's article mentions the 5,700 nuclear warheads,
434 ICBMs, 484 air-to-surface missiles, bombers, submarines, and what
have you, destroyed. However, he goes on to say, ``attempts to
consolidate and safeguard the much larger Russian stockpile of fissile
material--the essential ingredient of these doomsday weapons--have had
a more checkered record. Indeed, the first indication that Russia might
be leaking lethal nuclear material from the decreasingly decrepit
inventory is as early as 1992.'' He goes through each of the well-known
documented cases and attempts to pilfer kilograms here, pounds there,
of weapons-grade uranium.
The Russians still contend that all of these situations have been
stopped, that the perpetrators were caught, whether in Prague or St.
Petersburg or elsewhere.
``Today, U.S. experts at Los Alamos estimate that roughly 570 tons of
Russia's total 850 tons of weapons-usable material are more secure,''
but this leaves 280 tons that are not. They believe at Los Alamos that
clearly more than 200 tons of fissile material remaining largely
unsecured are in 104 of the 252 nuclear sites in which U.S. officials
have yet to gain access.
From my own personal experience, it is not easy to gain access to
areas in which the officials of the country do not wish you to gain
access. It is a bargaining process, trip by trip, site by site--whether
nuclear or biological or chemical. It is the first comprehensive figure
I have ever seen, however, that details there are 252 known sites where
there is fissile material--not warheads or ICBMs--and we have yet to
gain access to 104 of these, almost 40 percent.
To make my point again, while I counsel we approach Pakistan and
India with the thoughts of accessibility, accountability, and security,
we have a great deal of work still to do with friends in Russia with
whom we have been working for 10 years. The 10th anniversary of the
Nunn-Lugar Act occurred 2 days ago, and in this body. It was late in
that session in 1991 when the legislation was passed. For 10 years, we
have been at work, these two countries, Russia and the United States.
Yet even at this point, extraordinary amounts of material remain
perhaps less secure than they ought to be, and unavailable, at least
for our inspection even in this cooperative program.

Finally, the problems with the scientists are always speculative.
From the beginning, the thought has been, in addition to the material,
as Mr. Kitfield points out, there has to be one individual who has the
expertise with the program to bring it together if a weapon actually is
to be usable. The hope has been, through the International Science and
Technology Committee--and this body has appropriated funds, again, from
the State Department appropriation process--of a generous contribution
to that effort. In the past, there have been contributions by Japan, by
European countries, by Saudi Arabia and others.
In my own business, at their headquarters, I found our contribution
now unfortunately has risen to 60 percent. I say unfortunately because
it means others may have dropped off of the program. But with good
diplomacy, others may drop back in.
Under this program, over 20,000 Russian scientists have been paid
stipends to furnish them money to do other work--work in commercially
viable propositions in Russia that do not involve weapons of mass
destruction. I cannot overstate how vital this has been in sustaining
the interests of those scientists in continuing to live in Russia as
they wanted to do, provided there was any work--at a time that the
Russian military establishment was winding down. Obviously, programs
producing fissile material have been virtually stopped.
I have no idea how many scientists there are in Russia who at any one
time were involved as experts in weapons of mass destruction. We have
no way of knowing whether 20,000 represents most of them or a majority.
We have, according to Mr. Kitfield and the experts at Los Alamos and
Sandia, luck that the coincidence of scientists, material, cell groups
have not quite come together yet.
The point of this statement at this late hour today is to say that we
cannot count on that. America has been staggered and shocked and
grieved by September 11. Horrible circumstances.
Testimony before a committee I chaired involving those deeply
involved in this subject and who knew a great deal about it, brought a
witness who had the proverbial thin suitcase. He laid it down on the
witness table. At the appropriate time, he opened it and there was a
machined piece of metal, something like a pineapple in both its shape
and size. He assured us this was not highly enriched uranium.
Nevertheless, there were materials in this particular piece that a
counter would register.
At this point, many in the audience backed away from the table. This
hearing was turning into somewhat more of an interesting situation than
some asked for. He made the point this was probably equivalent in size
to 16 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
The article states some scientists say you need 55 pounds of highly
enriched uranium in order to have a nuclear weapon. Some would say it
is more like 100 pounds. So 16 pounds would not get the job done, nor
did he purport that it would. He suggested, however, enlarging this
pineapple with a few more layers would get you to that point.

This came just after the tragedy at Oklahoma City and the bombing of
the courthouse by McVeigh and whoever was involved with him. That would
now be classified, in many circles, as sort of the forerunner of the
dirty bomb situation. That is, you have some materials, at least, that
have properties that are nuclear but they are not at the highly
enriched level. But you use common or garden variety explosives and you
create a mess. McVeigh, as far as we know, was not attempting to
combine the explosives with nuclear material at any level.
So I cite this example as only illustrative, in two ways. One was
that half of that Federal courthouse was destroyed, along with a number
of Americans, innocents, who were in that courthouse at the time.
The witness made the point, however, that if you had the proper
expertise and you had the suitcase and the 55 or 100-pound weapon in
this same pineapple shape, this would have had the effect of taking out
4 square miles of Oklahoma City, not just half of the Federal building.
Others have made the point that even without highly enriched uranium,
the so-called dirty bomb, which does include some nuclear material but
simply with an explosive device, could render the same territory in New
York City uninhabitable for a fairly sizable period of time after the
destruction of many lives in the process of the fallout of this
material, much like the effects down range from the Chernobyl explosion
in Ukraine where hundreds of thousands of acres will not be farmed for
our lifetime and many after that, or, if they are farmed, may have
devastating health consequences, given the spoiling of the soil, the
trees, the animals--everything that was involved. In short, this is the
danger.
I think our officials understand this. But I am hopeful that as we
proceed in subsequent years with our military appropriations, and our
Department of Energy appropriations, and our State Department
appropriations--because all of these efforts are divided in several
ways, each one of them vital to the overall objective--that we have an
understanding of how large a proposition this is.
This does not for a moment negate the need for the very best trained
and

[[Page S13286]]

paid American troops we have, and support of them, and all of the
instruments of conventional warfare that are now being produced. But I
am saying that once again the bottom line of the war, as I perceive it,
is that even as we are very successful with these so-called
conventional means, and with remarkable, talented American service
personnel, on the homefront, here in the home defense situation, we
need to understand the vulnerability we have in the same way that we
explained it to those in Moscow and London and Rome and other beautiful
capital cities of our world that are at risk if in fact this
intersection between cells of terrorism and materials and weapons of
mass destruction should develop.
There are people who say this is so pervasive and so comprehensive
that school is out, it is beyond remedy. The numbers of terrorists, the
numbers of countries, numbers of programs, regimes all believing they
must have weapons of mass destruction or at least the threat of these
to stave off whoever --and I understand that, as the Presiding Officer
does. But our objective, at least, as policy leaders in this country,
has to be a ``go to it'' spirit.
If at this point we simply accept it is there, we have to accept that
at some point a very large part of one of our cities or our basic
institutions could be under attack and this time could disappear, with
absolutely devastating results for our country or any other country
that was victimized in this way.
If we ask the basic questions we would have asked before September
11--Who could possibly do this? And for what reason?--we are staggered
as we watch the tape of Osama bin Laden or listen to interviews with
people who seem to be committed to a very different course of action
that most of us find even remotely conceivable, morally or as human
beings.
Unless we are prepared simply to forget September 11, roll the clock
back into a simpler time, then we will have to deal with more complex
times.
I thank the Chair for allowing me to proceed in morning business with
a message that I believe is important.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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