| Worried about the apocalyptic prospect of international
terrorists obtaining nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,
U.S. and Russian officials and analysts met Monday to help draft
possible new safeguards. Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and Richard
Lugar, a U.S. senator from Indiana -- who together launched the
decade-old U.S. effort to help contain the threat of weapons of
mass destruction in the former Soviet Union -- described the threat
of "catastrophic terrorism" as possibly the gravest
challenge to global security.
"We are in a new arms race," Nunn said at a conference
organized by the Nuclear
Threat Initiative foundation he co-chairs with CNN founder Ted
Turner. "Terrorists
and certain states are racing to acquire weapons of mass
destruction, and we ought to
be racing together to stop them."
The Nunn-Lugar program has helped Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus
become nuclear-free nations and provided assistance to Russia
in costly efforts to dismantle its nuclear weapons, secure nuclear
and chemical stockpiles and find civilian jobs for former weapons
scientists.
Lugar noted that much remained undone: Only 40 percent of
nuclear storage sites in
Russia have received U.S. assistance to upgrade security, and
only 20 percent had
received complete security systems.
Despite the program's success, Lugar said it faced some
opposition in the U.S.
Congress because of Russia's failure to provide full
information about its activities in
the chemical and biological weapons area -- including Moscow's
refusal to allow
monitors into four biological laboratories run by the Defense
Ministry.
"Continued [Russian] transfers of weapon technology to Iran
are also disturbing and
weaken support for an expanded and improved relationship,"
Lugar said.
The joint threat reduction program was launched in December
1991 and has been
promoted through more than two dozen projects. About $8.5
billion has been
earmarked for the program through 2003.
Lugar proposed that the program be extended to further upgrade
security at nuclear
storage facilities, help reduce the threats from tactical
nuclear weapons, dismantle more
nuclear-powered submarines and address other issues.
Alexei Arbatov, a deputy chief of the State Duma's defense
affairs committee, warned
that the international community may face new tough dilemmas
such as dealing with
national liberation movements linked with terrorists. "If
such
a movement is spotted to
have links with international terrorists, it must be destroyed
by combined global
efforts," he said.
See also:
Russia-US
relations
Anti-Terror Coalition
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