[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 94 (Tuesday, July 18, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1444-E1445]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       ADDRESS BY DR. GRAHAM ALLISON AT NUCLEAR DANGERS SYMPOSIUM

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                       HON. ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA

                           of american samoa

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 18, 2006

  Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, in reference to H. Res. 905, I submit 
an address by Dr. Graham Allison, Professor at Harvard University and 
Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 
presented on December 16, 2003 at a symposium entitled Kazakhstan: 
Reducing Nuclear Dangers, Increasing Global Security.

                           Symposium Remarks

                          (By Graham Allison)

       It is a great honor for me to participate in this happy 
     event and to celebrate the twelfth birthday of Kazakhstan, 
     and, as the Minister said, the tenth anniversary of 
     Kazakhstan's participation in the Nunn-Lugar CTR Program.
       I want to congratulate Ambassador Saudabayev and his 
     colleagues for putting together such a remarkable event, and 
     President Nazarbayev for the actions that make it possible 
     for us to celebrate this occasion.
       I am going to make four points.
       First, I want to agree strongly with Sam Nunn about the 
     importance of the success of Kazakhstan. John Kennedy had a 
     saying, which he would frequently observe, that ``success has 
     a thousand fathers, or mothers, and failure is an orphan.''
       If we are celebrating a success today, I would say this is 
     a success of President Nazarbayev for a leadership that is 
     truly remarkable and which one gets some sense for in his 
     book, Epicenter of Peace.
       But I would also celebrate Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar for 
     their initiative without which the events that we are 
     celebrating surely would not have occurred.
       Without the Nunn-Lugar Program, an initiative undertaken by 
     members of Congress, not by Administration, that put this 
     issue front and center and provide the wherewithal to deal 
     with it, the story of Kazakhstan, I believe, would have 
     turned out differently.
       So I want to congratulate the two of them and to say what a 
     remarkable process I believe this was.
       Historians have a hard time dealing with counterfactual. In 
     fact for all of us when something has happened, it seems 
     like, well, it almost had to happen.
       But let us imagine what might have been.
       Just imagine that a Kazakh leader, let's call him President 
     Nazarbayev, sought to rest operational control of some 1,400 
     nuclear weapons, the fourth largest arsenal in the world, 
     from former Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces' troops whose 
     chain of command continued to run to Moscow. Would they have 
     succeeded? Would Moscow have taken these efforts to seize 
     operational effort as a casus belli and attacked these 
     missile facilities or indeed Kazakhstan itself? Had a 
     contest for control of the nuclear arsenals ensued, would 
     some of these weapons have been fired? If so, since most 
     of the warheads were mounted on ICBMs that had been 
     programmed to hit and were targeted against the United 
     States, millions of Americans could have suffered instant 
     nuclear death.
       I had a great fortune to work in the first Clinton 
     Administration on nuclear weapons issues. And I believe that 
     without the courageous actions of President Nazarbayev, the 
     Kazakh government and the cooperation of the U.S. and Russian 
     government in that effort, and the US participation through 
     the Nunn-Lugar Program, these events would not have occurred 
     the way they did. That's my first point.
       Second point. I also wanted to support Sam Nunn in talking 
     about Kazakhstan being too modest, I think, too reserved, too 
     reticent about taking its example of nuclear disarmament to 
     others. I was actually encouraged when Ambassador Saudabayev 
     read the letter from President Nazarbayev and I am afraid I'm 
     not quoting him exactly, but I think he said, ``Kazakhstan 
     has earned the moral right to call on the world to follow its 
     example.'' I think that's exactly correct. And I think if the 
     Kazakh Government were a more active player with other 
     governments, especially acting on the basis of the moral 
     right that it has earned, the world would become a safer 
     place.
       Who could better deal with Iran than Kazakhstan?
       President Nazarbayev knows Iranian leadership very well 
     indeed. So who can explain to them the consequences of 
     alternative path better than President Nazarbayev? So I 
     thought that this has come to the point when Kazakhstan needs 
     to be less modest and less reserved. It should be proud of 
     what it accomplished becoming a nuclear-free nation.
       Thirdly. If the denuclearization of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, 
     and Belarus whose nuclear arsenal was eliminated was the 
     signal success of the 1990s, I believe, the signal failure 
     was the failure to capitalize on those events to push through 
     a more general solution.
       In 1998 nuclear tests were conducted by India and Pakistan 
     when they declared themselves nuclear weapons states. But 
     could one of them turn to example provided by Kazakhstan, and 
     Ukraine and Belarus, more, even more, becoming a platform or 
     a foundation of a more global effort to prevent nuclear 
     terrorism and to realize that the nuclear war could be lost? 
     And I believe the answer is yes.
       So, my fourth and final point, especially for Christmas 
     season, is a piece of good news. Good news that, I think, Sam 
     has already suggested, but I would like to put slightly more 
     provocatively.
       The unspoken and frequently unrecognized fundamental 
     insight, I believe, is that nuclear terrorism is preventable. 
     Nuclear terrorism is, in fact, preventable. In the absence of 
     fissile material, either enriched uranium or plutonium, there 
     could be no nuclear programs and, therefore, no nuclear 
     terrorism.
       So, all that we have to do, all is a lot, but all that we 
     have to do, is to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear 
     weapons or fissile materials for these weapons to develop.
       Fortunately, manufacturing or producing new highly enriched 
     uranium or plutonium is a successive lengthy process that 
     requires large and visible and indeed vulnerable facilities.
       Until now, all the fissile materials that currently exist 
     were successfully protected. The technology for doing so 
     already exists: Americans lose no gold from Fort Knox, nor 
     does Russia lose items from the Kremlin Armory.
       So all that we have to do, and it's a lot, but all that we 
     have to do is prevent production of new fissile material, 
     lock down or eliminate all the fissile materials that 
     currently exist.
       I have a piece in the current issue of the Foreign Affairs 
     that is coming out next week, in which I make this argument 
     at some length and propose a new doctrine of what I would 
     call the ``Three No's'':
       1. No new nuclear weapons.
       2. No new programs, no new facilities for producing either 
     enriched uranium or plutonium.
       3. No new nuclear states.
       Kazakhstan, I think, is the best example of all three of 
     these.
       There's no question that Kazakhstan can be a source of 
     nuclear 9/11, because Kazakhstan has no nuclear weapons, it 
     has no production facilities of either enriched uranium or 
     plutonium, and it has no fissile material.
       I believe that is something that people with Nuclear Threat 
     Initiative and Sam Nunn should be given credit for. And I 
     congratulate our Kazakh partners for their extraordinary 
     endeavor.
       Director of Harvard's major Belfer Center for Science and 
     International Affairs (BCSlA), Professor Graham Allison has 
     for three decades been a leading analyst of U.S. national 
     security and defense policy with a special interest in 
     terrorism. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first 
     Clinton Administration, Dr. Allison received the Defense 
     Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for 
     Distinguished Public Service, for ``reshaping relations with 
     Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former 
     Soviet nuclear arsenal.'' This resulted in the safe return of 
     more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former 
     Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 
     4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the 
     U.S. and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the 
     Soviet Union disappeared.
       As Director of BCSlA, Dr. Allison has assembled a team of 
     more than two dozen leading scholars and practitioners of 
     national security to analyze terrorism in its multiple 
     dimensions. Products include: Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy 
     (1996), America's Achilles Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and 
     Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (1998), Catastrophic 
     Terrorism (1998), and others.
       A 1995 Washington Post op-ed by Dr. Allison warned that: 
     ``In the absence of a determined program of action, we have 
     every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism before 
     this decade is out.'' Dr. Allison was the organizer of the 
     Commission on America's National Interests (1996 and 2000) 
     that included leading Senators and national security 
     specialists from across the country (former Senator Sam Nunn, 
     Senators John McCain, Bob Graham, and Pat Roberts, 
     Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage, Robert Ellsworth, and 
     others). The Commission's work highlighted the threat of 
     mega-terrorism as a major challenge to American national 
     interest. Senator Roberts credited the work of the 
     Commission as inspiration in his creating a Subcommittee 
     on Emerging Threats of the Senate Armed Services 
     Committee. At the initial session of that Subcommittee on 
     March 11, 1999 he warned that there is ``a real 
     opportunity for a handful of zealots to wreak havoc on a 
     scale that hitherto only armies could obtain. Targets will 
     be selected for their symbolic value, like the World Trade 
     Center in the heart of Manhattan, because terrorists need 
     to escalate their

[[Page E1445]]

     attacks, making each more spectacular and horrific than 
     its predecessor.
       Dr. Allison is also a leading analyst of Russia and its 
     transformation to democracy and market economy as well as an 
     authority on the threat of loose nukes and weapons of mass 
     destruction. He has written numerous articles and op-eds in 
     the foremost journals and newspapers and is a sought-after 
     speaker and commentator. Dr. Allison's seminal book, Essence 
     of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, first 
     published in 1971, and significantly revised and re-issued in 
     1999, ranks among the bestsellers in political science with 
     more than 350,000 copies in print.
       Dr. Allison was born and raised in Charlotte, North 
     Carolina. He was educated at Davidson College; Harvard 
     College (B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in History); Oxford 
     University (B.A. and M.A., First Class Honors in Philosophy, 
     Politics, and Economics); and Harvard University (Ph.D. in 
     PoIitical Science).

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