US and Russia Could Do More To Reduce Weapons Stockpile by Sharon Behn

NUKEWARS

US and Russia Could Do More To Reduce Weapons Stockpile

The forbidden zone of Yucca Flats

by Sharon Behn
Washington (AFP) Apr 23, 2002
Two leading US senators and weapons of mass destruction experts on Tuesday called on President George W. Bush's administration to do more to help Russia reduce access to its stockpiles by potential terrorists.

"The risks and vulnerabilities in the Russian nuclear complex remain high," warned Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

"We should ask Russia to join with us in a new cooperative effort to reduce the threat of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by improving nuclear security worldwide," he told a Senate panel.

Moreover, he added, in order to deal with the likelihood that some weapons-usable materials are already in "dangerous hands, the United States and Russia should now prepare to respond jointly to potential nuclear terrorist incidents or threats."

Such preparations, Hecker said, could include joint sting operations against suspected targets and joint emergency response operations.

Senate Foreign Relations chairman Joe Biden, together with Senator Richard Lugar who led the panel, pledged to push for expanded funding for US nonproliferation assistance to Russia, including a proposal in the pending Security Assistance Act to offer Moscow debt-for-nonproliferation swaps.

"The clock is ticking (and) it is one minute before midnight," said former defense secretary William Cohen. "We don't have a lot of time to reduce the threat that is out there."

"In this sense, ensuring a flexible, well-funded CTR (Cooperative Threat Reduction) program is among the most important responses we can make to the tragedy of September 11," he said in prepared remarks.

The Senate hearing took place as an US official revealed that a top al-Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan has told interrogators that the terrorist network knows how to make a radiological bomb and has been working to acquire one.

The official said the latest revelations by Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's operations director, did not come as a big surprise since the United States had already concluded that al-Qaeda was trying to build a so-called "dirty bomb" -- radiological weapons with nuclear materials wrapped around them.

The official would not comment on how close al-Qaeda had come to building radiological devices or whether it planned to use them against targets in the United States.

Washington believes al-Qaeda was responsible for the September suicide attacks that killed some 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

NUKEWARS

Critics Of US Say Nuclear Bunker-Buster Would Not Be Clean Bomb

New York (AFP) April 9, 2002
Critics of US nuclear policy said that bombs designed to destroy targets deep underground would spew enough radioactive fallout to kill tens of thousands at street level.

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