Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
3/14/2014
A senior White House official this week continued to defend the Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request for threat reduction and nonproliferation work, suggesting that the request was adequate to meet President Obama’s nuclear security goals. Requested funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation account dipped in FY 2015, down to $1.55 billion, a cut of $398.4 million from FY 2014 enacted levels, while the Pentagon’s Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction account also saw a major decrease. The Obama Administration is requesting $365.1 million in FY 2015 for CTR work, a $135.4 million reduction from FY 2014 funding levels.
Liz Sherwood-Randall, the White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction and Arms Control, said the decreases were partly a reflection of work completed in recent years as part of a four-year effort to secure vulnerable nuclear material around the world. “To the extent that we didn’t require funding for certain programs because they have already gotten their work done—that money is no longer in the budget,” Sherwood-Randall said at a National Journal policy summit this week, adding: “We assess that there is sufficient funding in the budget to achieve all of our nonproliferation goals in this time frame and to continue the very important work we do bilaterally with a number of countries to support their nuclear security regimes.”
Experts Criticize Nonprolif. Budget
Many nonproliferation experts have criticized the Administration for emphasizing nuclear weapons modernization over nonproliferation. “The signal that I’m receiving is that we’re in retreat,” Partnership for Global Security President Ken Luongo said last week at a Fissile Materials Working Group event. “I think that’s a huge mistake and I think it sends exactly the wrong signal to the rest of the world.”
Luongo questioned how nuclear security wasn’t a priority in the budget when preventing nuclear terrorism is among the Administration’s top priorities. “There was a lack of leadership in trying to maintain the prioritization of the funding for this issue. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that you want to walk into the summit as the initiator of the summit with two weights around your ankle,” Luongo said, referencing the budget issues and U.S. failure to ratify two key treaties, the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and the International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.
Tension With Russia a Major Stumbling Block
NNSA officials also said the expiration of the CTR umbrella agreement with Russia a year ago—and the creation of a new agreement—slowed all nuclear security and nonproliferation work in Russia and led to some of the cuts in the budget. As contracts under the CTR umbrella agreement were renegotiated, some physical upgrades at Russian facilities have had to be put on hold, NNSA nonproliferation chief Anne Harrington said last week, and the current situation between the U.S. and Ukraine make the situation even more uncertain. “We are actively in the process of negotiating those changes to the agreements but obviously the current situation between Russia and the Ukraine and what decisions the White House and the President make on the future of our engagement with Russia is to be determined,” Harrington said.
Matt Bunn, a Harvard-based nuclear security expert, said he was worried that tensions between the U.S. and Russia could sidetrack work on nonproliferation and nuclear security, though Sherwood-Randall said the two countries continue to cooperate on issues involving the Nuclear Security Summit later this month (see related story). “I worry because of the really toxic state of U.S.-Russian relations at the moment. I think we really need to focus on finding some negotiated resolution on the situation in Ukraine because, I think, otherwise it will have a very poisonous effect on all of these other important kinds of cooperation that we’re working on,” Bunn said at the policy summit.
He emphasized that while much had been done in Russia to secure nuclear materials and beef up security at nuclear sites, there was still a significant amount of work to be done. He noted that there are still issues with sustaining the upgrades at many of the sites as well as problems with security culture and protecting against insider threats. “It was just on the point of sort of getting moving again with discussions back and forth when the Ukraine crisis broke out,” he said. “I remain hopeful that we will be able to get that back on even keel, and if we manage to resolve the Ukraine crisis and get back to some reasonable level of tension in our relations, really put it on a new level of equal partnership.”
