WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Barack Obama has signed spending measures that provide more than $1 billion in fiscal 2010 funding devoted to three high-profile threat reduction programs at the Defense and Energy departments (see GSN, Dec. 22).
(Dec. 23) -
Workers handle nerve gas containers at Shchuchye, Russia. Work was finished this year on a U.S.-funded chemical weapons disposal plant at that site (U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Bellona).
The $636 billion defense appropriations legislation, one of the last remaining spending measures for the budget year that began Oct. 1, was inked Monday. It allocates $424 million for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the Pentagon effort to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states and beyond.
"Not less than" $15 million of the funding is set to support the "dismantling and disposal of nuclear submarines, submarine reactor components, and security enhancements for transport and storage of nuclear warheads in the Russian Far East and North," the legislation states.
The final House-Senate conference report and previous incarnations of the bill do not specify how the remaining funds would be spent. Defense Department officials could not be reached for comment today.
Nonproliferation has been near the top of the administration's policy agenda since the president gave a wide-ranging speech on the topic last April (see GSN, April 6). Speaking in Prague, Obama called for, among other actions, eventual global nuclear disarmament; enactment of a fissile materials cutoff treaty; and securing the world's loose nuclear materials within the next four years.
The threat reduction program's newly minted $424 million budget is an increase of $20 million from the administration's initial $404 million request -- courtesy of the Senate -- but $10 million less than was appropriated for the program in fiscal 2009.
After adjusting for inflation, the appropriated amount is $79 million -- or 17 percent -- less than the Bush-era annual average of $474 million in 2009 dollars, according to an analysis by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
A key reason for the decrease in funding is the completion of construction of the U.S.-backed chemical weapons disposal plant at Shchuchye in Russia, said Mark Hayes, spokesman for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).
"There's money to maintain the facility but we were spending a substantial part of the money on building the facility," he told Global Security Newswire yesterday. The program also completed building two biological agent monitoring stations in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Hayes added.
While the program's reduced budget "makes sense," the administration's initial $404 million request "has been a subject of concern among those of us in the arms control" community, according to Kingston Reif, deputy director of nuclear nonproliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
The White House set a "very ambitious goal" for securing the world's nuclear materials, he said, so "we were a little disappointed to see that at least the 2010 request was even less than the 2009 [request] and was also less than what was appropriated in 2009."
"A year is going to be gone here of the four years when the new budget comes out [next February] and there are only going to be three years left," Reif told GSN.
One of the justifications for the reduced budget could be that the administration was still working out the strategy to achieve its nuclear-security goal when it issued its fiscal 2010 budget last February, according to Reif.
The administration also could be waiting on the results of its Nuclear Posture Review, he added. That document, slated to be released early next year, will establish policies and strategies for the U.S. nuclear deterrent over the next five to 10 years.
Lawmakers this fall approved language in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill to allow to the threat reduction program to accept financial support from foreign governments and other international entities.
The bill also enables the Defense Department to spend as much as one-tenth of the program's budget on unanticipated nonproliferation operations.
Hayes said that provision would give the program greater flexibility to deal with "emerging threats." He likened it to 2004 when then-President George W. Bush authorized the program to fund destruction of Cold War-era chemical weapons found in Albania, the first project outside of the former Soviet Union to receive CTR funding (see GSN, Oct. 22, 2004).
Since its inception in 1991, the Nunn-Lugar program has deactivated 7,514 strategic nuclear warheads; destroyed 768 intercontinental ballistic missiles; 498 ICBM silos and 143 mobile launchers; 651 submarine launched ballistic missiles and 476 launchers; 32 nuclear submarines; 155 bombers; 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles; and 194 nuclear test tunnels, according to a Lugar press release.
In addition, the program has safeguarded 468 nuclear-weapon train shipments, boosted security at 24 nuclear weapons storage facilities and constructed 19 biological agent monitoring stations.
It also helped to remove all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, nations that once respectively held the world's third-, fourth- and eighth-largest nuclear arsenals, according to the release.
Energy Department
Funding for the Energy Department, which the president signed into law Oct. 28, provides $333.5 million for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative to track down, protect and eliminate potential radiological and nuclear-weapon materials internationally, according to the legislation's conference report.
The White House had sought $353.5 million for the effort, a 10.5-percent reduction from previous funding levels. Both the House and Senate funded the program at $333.5 million.
The program is run by the National Nuclear Security Administration a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department that also manages the U.S. national laboratories, oversees stewardship of the country's nuclear stockpile and conducts nonproliferation projects around the world.
In May, NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino told House lawmakers the effort was scaled back because a significant amount of work had wrapped up in the last year, including a program that extracted 162.5 pounds of spent nuclear fuel from Kazakhstan (see GSN, May 27).
About $30 million of this year's funding would go toward accelerating the conversion of research reactors to support the domestic production of molybdenum-99, an isotope used in medical treatments.
The final conference agreement sets aside $10 million to undertake a "full inventory" of all Energy Department and NNSA nuclear material to determine if they "have value and can be reused in other mission or commercial applications."
In February 2009, the DOE inspector general released a report that found the department could not account for 37 percent of the nuclear materials that had been "loaned or leased for research or medical purposes," a serious security concern.
Senate lawmakers also expressed concern that "new nuclear sources are being created without consideration of how these will ultimately be tracked, stored and safely disposed." The upper chamber's bill noted the issue was addressed during a March 2009 International Atomic Energy Agency workshop, which urged a more comprehensive "cradle to grave" management strategy of medical and industrial seal radioactive sources.
In their version of the bill, House lawmakers recommended $71.5 million for converting reactors away from use of highly enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons. That is the same as the administration's request but roughly $12 million less than was provided in fiscal 2009, the final version of their bill states.
Meanwhile, $31 million would be provided for the Gap Nuclear Material Removal program which secures nuclear material that is not covered by other pre-existing nuclear material threat reduction programs. That amount is $20 million less than requested but nearly $24 million above last year's budget.
"The reduction is in response to recent setbacks in negotiations with North Korea," the legislation states. "Preparations, including long-lead procurement, should continue to be taken for dismantling the North Korean program, and ($20 million) is provided for this effort."
House lawmakers also set aside $9 million for, a joint effort by the U.S. and Kazakh governments to improve safety and security for the plutonium-bearing spent fuel from the BN-350 reactor at Aktau, Kazakhstan. The administration had requested $9 million for the program.
"This marks the final phase of an important effort in Kazakhstan to secure approximately 3,000 kilograms of weapons grade plutonium and 10,000 kilograms of HEU in spent fuel," the final House bill states.
Legislators also put aside $250,000 for "congressionally directed projects."
The conference report from the two chambers does not specify whether funding was provided for the spending plans outlined in the separate bills. Officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration were not immediately available for comment.
It was also not clear from the available conference report of House and Senate version of the spending bill how the remaining funds would be distributed.
The Energy Department's International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program is set to receive $572 million to enhance the security of vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear material in countries, most notably Russia.
Roughly $63 million would be provided for civilian nuclear sites. Slightly more than $78 million would go toward the Second Line of Defense program which aims to strengthen the capability of foreign governments to detect and interdict illicit trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials across international borders.
The conference bill does not state how the rest of the funds would be allocated.
Reif said the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, the fiscal 2011 budget and that Obama administration's nuclear security summit next spring will "determine the direction of our threat reduction efforts."
Until then "the U.S. isn't going to able to achieve the sort of lofty goal the Obama administration laid out in the Prague speech and during the [presidential] campaign ... of securing all vulnerable fissile materials in four years without a much larger commitment to these programs," he said.