Not true. Rep. Chet Edwards, a Democrat from Texas, has been on Capitol Hill for 11 years. He’s a moderate, respected in both parties, and a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee. His district encompasses Waco and a little town called Crawford. But President Bush’s congressman describes himself as “incredibly frustrated.”
“Congress can find $256 million to protect itself, but can’t find one additional dime to protect Americans from the real threat of nuclear terrorism,” Edwards says. “It borders on the criminal.”
Edwards is talking about the decision of the Appropriations Committee to reject efforts to expand funding for safeguarding loose nukes in the former Soviet Union. On a straight party line vote, the Committee, at the behest of the White House, decided it was business as usual on controlling the possible sale of nuclear materials to terrorists.
Everyone agrees the Department of Energy program is working well and is not wasting money. Everyone understands that only a third of the dangerous Russian nuclear facilities have been secured. No one denies the seriousness of the threat.
In fact, President Bush himself said on November 6: “We will not wait for more innocent deaths. We will not wait for the authors of mass death to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now, because we must lift this dark threat from our age and save generations to come.”
But we are not acting fast enough. Or so people like former Sen. Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler believe. They authored a report last January that said that the possibility of stolen or diverted nuclear material from Russia was “the most urgent national security threat facing the United States today.”
The facts are terrifying. More than 600 tons of enriched uranium are in “urgent need” of immediate safeguards. That’s enough to build 41,000 nuclear bombs. Thousands of Russian nuclear scientists remain unemployed. Scores of Russian nuclear facilities remain unsecured, despite considerable progress on that front since the mid-1990s. Since 1992, there have been 14 documented cases in which highly enriched uranium was stolen from the former Soviet Union, and later seized by Russian officials. Eight of those seizures took place outside of Russia, in places like Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. None of the cases involved enough material to make a bomb, but that’s hardly reassuring. What about the seizures that were never made?
Baker and Cutler recommend spending $3 billion a year on State, Defense and Energy department programs to address these threats. The reaction from the White House? In its first budget, the Office of Management and Budget proposed cutting $100 million from the $850 million devoted to such efforts. After a broad internal review and the events of September 11, the administration agreed to keep funding flat instead of slashing it.
But why should it be flat? Why shouldn’t it be expanded at least to what Baker and Cutler recommended in January?
On “Meet the Press” last week, Tim Russert asked Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, why this program was facing the budget ax. Rice said the program was working well and “the money is a function of how much money is needed in any given year to actually carry out the programs that are planned.”
Look at that answer closely. Rice is a talented government official with much on her plate. But on nuclear threats, she may still be living in a pre-September 11 world. The “programs that are planned” were planned in the 1990s, before we realized that terrorists would actually use these weapons if they got them. If those programs cannot accommodate more money now, they need to be “planned” differently–accelerated and expanded to meet the threat. And pronto.
The Bush administration, which, like the Clinton administration, has been working hard on non-proliferation issues, raises some reasonable objections. The Russians don’t admit they have a problem with loose nukes, so we can’t make too much noise in assessing the threat. Quiet cooperation has worked much better, and this fall the Russian government agreed to provide even more access to its facilities than in the past. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget is concerned about how fast any new money could be used. “You can always spend more money, but there’s the issue of what can be absorbed efficiently,” says one senior administration official.
Even so, Chet Edwards was stunned when he heard Rep. Tom DeLay say in the Appropriations Committee last week that we should “wait until next year” to increase funding of these and other programs. “Everyone agrees in theory that we ought to do a lot more,” Edwards says. “But then there’s no action.”
The congressman intends to keep pressing the issue, maybe even paying a visit to his famous constituent (whom he’s known for 20 years) at his Crawford ranch. “Say that one morning I woke up and saw that two million had been killed in Chicago or Los Angeles or somewhere,” Edwards says. “I would literally never be able to sleep again if I thought I hadn’t done all I could to prevent it.”
