Nunn still pushing safeguards on nuclear material

[struggle4progress]

By BOB DEANS
Cox News Service
Published on: 09/01/07

... Q. It's also been 15 years since that legislation you co-authored with Sen. Lugar set into place the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. It's helped to destroy or deactivate some seven thousand nuclear warheads, nearly 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles and hundreds of missile silos, mobile launchers and other equipment. How much safer is the world today as a result of those efforts?

A. You really can't prove a negative, but in my view there was a very high likelihood, if we had not had such a program, that the Russians' effort to deal with their own vast stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and materials would have moved at a very slow pace and we would have had enormous dangers of leakage of both know-how and of weapon-grade material. I think there is a much higher probability that we would have had some type of terrible nuclear catastrophe by now if we had not had that program. That's my view, and it's not provable, but I think it's also the Russian view. Much more important than what we've already accomplished is the trust that has been built between thousands of people at the lower levels in the laboratories and defense establishments and military bases and chemical storage facilities. ././. That is the foundation on which trust can be built in both countries to really tackle these problems.

Q. Russia still has, according to the Federation of American Scientists, nearly 6,000 operational nuclear warheads, and perhaps 15,000 more in stockpiles. The United States still has some 5,000 operational warheads and another 10,000 in stockpiles. Why do the United States and Russia still need 35,000 nuclear bombs between them?

A. We don't, and both countries have fortunately recognized that. We're moving down to somewhere between 1,700 and 2,100 deployed weapons - each country - so we are heading downward in deployed weapons. But what we haven't done is made any agreement on substantial reductions of inventories, and I think that's very much in the interests of both countries. And I'd like to see us take all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert - a couple thousand on both sides. We still have a situation where the chances of some type of accident or miscalculation or misjudgment would create serious dangers to each other ...

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2007/09/01/nunn_0902.html

[bananas]

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