Defense Daily
With tensions rising between the United States and Russia in Europe and the Middle East, lawmakers responsible for securing the Soviet Union’s nuclear stockpile after its collapse on Monday called for building a bridge between the old enemies at least on the subject of nuclear weapons.
Retired Sens. Sam Nun (D-Ga.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) were at the Pentagon May 9 to mark the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the enactment of their eponymous legislation, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.
“We are at juncture again when we have all sorts of problems with Russia,” Nunn said. “We have a lot of differences, but we still have 90 percent of the nuclear weapons, 90 percent of the nuclear materials and the knowhow to try to prevent catastrophe. If we don’t work together, if we don’t find a bridge to work with the Russians, this danger is still out there.”
Nunn, who currently is chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, warned of the proliferation and accidental or intentional detonation of radiological dirty bombs and chemical weapons. With Russia and the U.S. military at each other’s throats in Eastern Europe and involved in a proxy war of sorts in Syria, Nunn said it was imperative that the two Cold War powers come to a separate peace on the issue of nuclear weapons.
“We have got to build a bridge with the Russians on this subject even when we disagree with them on others,” Nunn said. “That’s an absolutely essential thing now.”
September marks the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the genesis of the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. A conference room adjacent to the secretary of defense’s office was named for the two lawmakers in honor of their contributions.
When the Iron Curtain fell, the West was concerned that the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and fissile material used to make them would disappear and fall into the wrong hands. The Nunn-Lugar legislation sought to corral, secure nuclear weapons within the former Soviet Union and create a cooperative disarmament regime.
“It also had 40,000 tons of chemical weapons and a deadly stockpile of biological agents ready for use,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at the commemoration. “These weapons were spread across the vast Soviet empire and in Eastern Europe, too. As the Soviet Union reformed, faltered and began to disintegrate, control of this arsenal was in doubt.”
The 1989 collapse of Soviet Russia was the first-ever disintegration of a nuclear state, Carter said. The CTR secured the huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction through the transition and prevented mass proliferation.
Eventually Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus denuclearized and destroyed masses of fissile materials like plutonium used to make nuclear bombs. Also destroyed were delivery vehicles to include 2,650 Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and bombers, Carter said.
Whereas in 1994 there were 13,300 warheads in the former Soviet Union, there are fewer than 2,000 today. CTR also aided in the destruction of two million Soviet artillery rounds filled with chemical weapons and an anthrax production facility in Kazakhstan.
“Together, with all that the world came through a historic moment of change safely,” Carter said. “It certain didn’t look likely or possible at the time.”
