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Nunn issues warning on nuclear materials

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Sam Nunn said Monday that the U.S. and other countries "could face disaster" unless they "greatly elevate" efforts to keep nuclear bomb-making materials out of the hands of terrorists.

"The terrorists are racing, and we are somewhere between a walk and a crawl," the Georgia Democrat told a forum organized by former members of the 911 Commission to measure progress on security recommendations they issued a year ago in a report that became a national best-selling book.

Nunn, who as a senator co-authored a U.S. program that helps the former Soviet states dismantle or secure their nuclear stockpiles, said responsibility for safeguarding the world's nuclear materials lies largely with the United States and Russia. On a scale of 1 to 10, he rated that effort at "3."

Nunn laid out a nightmare scenario in which a terrorist group detonated a nuclear bomb in one city and then announced that they were going to blow up another.

"That's the kind of horror we would face," said Nunn, who is now CEO of the nonprofit group Nuclear Threat Initiative.

"We believe that ... seeing the danger is the first step to improving security, and that public understanding is absolutely essential if we are to meet these challenges head-on," he said.

Nunn urged the United States to resolve a long-standing dispute over legal liability that he said has "gummed up" the U.S.-aided drive to secure Russia's nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Nunn said he was hopeful that the issue—which involves who would pay if there were an accident during the process of securing the materials — will be settled when President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet next week in Scotland at the annual G-8 economic summit.

He also urged the two governments to reach agreement on the monitoring of smaller nuclear "tactical" weapons. "We don't have good counts on those, we don't know where they are," Nunn said. He rated progress in this area at 1 on a scale 1 to 10.

In addition, the U.S. and its global partners should move to "clean out" highly enriched uranium that more than 40 countries are storing in more than 100 research labs, many of them poorly protected, he said. The material can be used to make a nuclear bomb.

The former senator also gave low ratings to efforts to safeguard biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction built under the Soviet regime.

Nunn described a remote Russian chemical facility at Shusha, where nearly 2 million artillery tubes filled with nerve gas are stored in flimsy structures. "Most of them are not well enough built to house your favorite horse, let alone chemical weapons that could wipe out mankind," Nunn said.

A canister of that nerve gas "could fit in a briefcase and would be a terrorist's dream," he said.

Despite his sobering assessment, Nunn said that some progress has been made, including the removal of all nuclear weapons from the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus and Libya's decision to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Nunn defended the $400 million a year that the United States gives Russia to help safeguard its weapons through the 13-year-old Nunn-Lugar program, named for the Georgian and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lugar, an Indiana Republican.

"It's fundamentally a Russian responsibility" to take care of its aging stockpiles, Nunn said. "But it's our security."

On the Internet, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project formed by former 9/11 Commission members can be found at http://www.9-11pdp.org