[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 26260-26266]
[From the U.S. 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)

       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 feel 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 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

[[Page 26261]]

     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 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

[[Page 26262]]

     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.
       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

[[Page 26263]]

     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.


[[Page 26264]]

  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:

       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

[[Page 26265]]

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.
  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

[[Page 26266]]

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 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.

                          ____________________