September 26, 2005
PAGE ONE
Closed Doors
In Russia, Securing
Its Nuclear Arsenal
Is an Uphill Battle
Despite U.S. Help, Program
Faces Resistance, Delays
Amid Chill in Relations
A Warehouse Sits Empty
By CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and ALAN CULLISON
Staff Re****ters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 26, 2005; Page A1
OUTSIDE OZERSK, Russia -- Twenty-one months after the U.S. turned over
the keys to the Russian government, the Mayak nuclear warehouse near
here sits empty.
Built with more than $400 million in U.S. funds, the fortress-like
building was supposed to be a centerpiece of American efforts to lock
up Russia's vast nuclear arsenal. It has room for more than 50 metric
tons of weapons-grade plutonium and 23-foot-thick walls designed to
withstand earthquakes, fires and armor-piercing bombs.
U=2ES. officials say they've been told that a Kremlin budgeting glitch
delayed personnel training but that loading of the warehouse should
begin by mid-2006. A senior Russian official suggests that it might not
be filled until there's an agreement on how the U.S. will monitor what
goes inside. People living around this once-secret city, the site of
some of the world's worst nuclear pollution, say they'd like to keep it
empty forever.
The warehouse shows how the effort to secure Russia's vast arsenal
remains an uphill battle even as concerns about nuclear terrorism have
risen in the post-9/11 world. So far, the U.S. has provided
state-of-the-art security for 48 of the 85 nuclear warhead storage and
handling sites slated for upgrades, but there could be dozens more
sites that the two sides may never agree to work on. With Russian
nationalism and oil revenues on the rise, the relation****p is
increasingly uneasy. Russian officials say flatly that they will never
allow the Americans near two huge weapons assembly facilities that are
believed to hold a quarter of the country's highly enriched uranium and
plutonium not already in warheads.
Since 1991 the U.S. has spent about $7 billion on Russian nuclear
security and achieved some im****tant successes. To help Russia meet its
arms-control treaty commitments, the U.S. has paid to slice hundreds of
nuclear-launch missiles, submarines and bombers into scrap metal.
Thousands of weapons scientists have received at least tem****ary
nonweapons work. In a separate commercial venture, 250 metric tons of
highly enriched uranium taken from dismantled warheads have been
blended down and burned as fuel in American nuclear-power reactors.
Still, with Wa****ngton's attention focused on the nuclear proliferation
dangers posed by Iran and North Korea, many of the efforts to secure
Russia's far larger arsenal have been mired in midlevel bureaucratic
wrangling. The pace has picked up since President Bush pressed the
issue at a February summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But
U=2ES. officials say privately that a chill in U.S.-Russian relations and
the growing power of Russia's security services make any gains fragile.
Throughout, the program has faced resistance from Russian officials who
saw it as a way for the U.S. to steal military secrets and from members
of the U.S. Congress who saw it as another foreign-aid boondoggle. One
of the most difficult issues continues to be the U.S. demand that
American officials get access to any site, no matter how sensitive, to
ensure that U.S. tax dollars aren't being wasted.
In a scene reminiscent of the Cold War, border guards in the Russian
city of Perm late last month briefly detained a U.S. delegation led by
Sen. Richard Lugar, a father of the nuclear security program. The
guards insisted on searching the delegation's plane, relenting only
after Wa****ngton protested to the Kremlin.
In 1991, with the Soviet Union unraveling, Mr. Lugar and former Georgia
Sen. Sam Nunn began pu****ng for funding to help Moscow dismantle and
secure its nuclear weapons. The main fear in those days, says Mr.
Lugar, was of "Red Army privateers and maybe even high-ranking
officials" trying to seize their own arsenals.
More Stability
Today, the Russian government is far more stable, and with oil over $60
a barrel, increasingly able to pay its own bills. But U.S. officials
say the Kremlin has been disturbingly slow to react to the new threats
it faces, even after a series of brutal attacks by Chechen terrorists.
"I don't think they've internalized" the dangers, says Paul Longsworth,
until recently a deputy administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear
Security Administration, which helps Russia secure its nuclear sites.
He says it's worthwhile for the U.S. to pay for Russian nuclear
security because "if we do the job we know that it's done."
The size of Russia's nuclear arsenal is a state secret. U.S. analysts
estimate that Russia may have as much as 600 metric tons of plutonium
and highly enriched uranium stored outside of weapons and around 16,000
warheads stored at 100 to 150 sites of varying size.
During the Cold War the Soviet Union hid its nuclear design and
production facilities in 10 secret cities, including Ozersk, site of
the empty Mayak warehouse. The Soviets erased the names of these cities
from maps, and they barred outsiders from entering and most residents
from leaving.
Even today, rusting barbed-wire fences surround Ozersk, and the city is
still off-limits to most outsiders. A sign on the road toward the city
warns in English and Russian: "Entrance of the foreign citizens is
strictly prohibited without special permission." Further down is a
security post, gate and guards armed with assault rifles.
Once U.S. officials got beyond that perimeter they found security
frighteningly lax. Rose Gottemoeller, then a senior official in the
Department of Energy, visited Ozersk in 1999 and recalls being taken to
an old warehouse where the wooden door was closed with a single, creaky
metal lock and the glass windows had no bars. Inside, she says, "on the
floor were rows and rows of little buckets with their handles sticking
up and plutonium inside."
Ms. Gottemoeller says her guide asked her if she'd like to see what a
bucket of plutonium looks like and then handed her one. While limited
contact with plutonium isn't dangerous unless it is ingested, she says
it was "pretty frightening" to think how easily those buckets could end
up in the wrong hands.
Since then the U.S. has provided high-tech security and accounting
systems for more than half of the buildings with nuclear material in
Russia's far-flung research and development complex. They are believed
to contain about 30% of Russia's stocks of weapons-grade uranium and
plutonium.
Getting Russia's military brass to accept help at secret warhead
storage sites involves particularly delicate wooing. In a nation where
the military is cash-starved and facilities are often run-down, the
main attraction is the offer of free high-tech security.
A small training base in the town of Sergeev Posad outside Moscow --
built with some $20 million in U.S. funds for the Russian Army's main
nuclear security force -- is a glittering showroom of all the Americans
can provide. The grass along the three rows of concrete and barbed-wire
fences is freshly mowed and the tree lines are trimmed to prevent
aggressors from hiding. To gain entrance on a recent morning, a visitor
had to pass first through a "mantrap" -- a metal cage in which the gate
to get inside the base opens only after the gate to the outside is
closed.
Security Measures
Standing beside the thick metal door of a model nuclear bunker, base
commander Col. Sergei Gruzdiev ticked off all the features that he says
would make it "nearly impossible" for thieves or terrorists to steal a
warhead. Key cards, code pads, motion detectors and three levels of
video surveillance would all have to be disabled just to get to this
point. To then unlock the bunker door, three people with proper
clearance must place their hands on a biometric scanner. "It has to be
a live hand," the colonel noted.
Such enthusiasm is bearing fruit. The Pentagon is currently installing
technology similar to the kind Col. Gruzdiev showed off at a dozen of
the Russian army's nuclear warhead storage sites. And Moscow recently
turned over a list of a further 18 for which it wants help. The
Pentagon, which says it won't contribute to Russian military readiness
by upgrading security at active military bases, is likely to approve 15
to 16 of those requests.
For all Col. Gruzdiev's enthusiasm, there was a noticeable chill in the
air when a group from Raytheon Co., which had just won a Pentagon
contract to upgrade security at several storage sites, arrived for its
tour. They were left standing on the town road outside the base for
more than 30 minutes -- apparently a gesture to show who controlled the
gate.
The U.S. is now pressing Russia hard to accept help securing its two
largest nuclear sites: the warhead assembly and disassembly facilities
in the secret cities of Lesnoy and Trekhgorny. But the Russian nuclear
establishment is fearful of letting slip the closely guarded secrets of
its warhead manufacturing and design.
To calm those fears, last fall the U.S. took a group of experts from
Russia's nuclear agency for a tour of its own top-secret
nuclear-weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas. U.S. officials say
they hoped to show the Russians that the limited access the U.S. was
seeking wouldn't endanger any secrets. Vladimir Kuchinov, who heads the
international cooperation department at Russia's Federal Agency for
Atomic Energy, wasn't impressed. "Have you any information about what
the Russians saw?" he asks. "Just the fence and nothing more. We also
can in the spirit of reciprocity show them the fence."
As for letting the U.S. help protect Lesnoy and Trekhgorny, Mr.
Kuchinov -- who Wa****ngton considers one of the more sympathetic
Russian officials -- says flatly: "It's off the table."
Driven in part by new oil wealth, Russians increasingly bridle at being
****trayed as a junior partner or a nation in need of handouts. Evgeny
Avrorin, the scientific director at the closed nuclear city of
Snezhinsk, says the Nunn-Lugar program was essential when the Soviet
Union was collapsing. "It's all become more difficult," he says. A
common view on the Russian side, he says, is: "We gave up too many of
our secrets for too little money."
Even program boosters in Russia say the U.S. has sometimes made
problems worse by appearing deaf to these sentiments. The two
governments have agreed to jointly get rid of 68 metric tons of
weapons-grade plutonium, each burning 34 tons as reactor fuel. But the
project was stalled for more than two years after a newly assertive
Moscow insisted that if U.S. government personnel or contractors
committed an act of sabotage or terrorism while building a new fuel
fabrication plant in Russia, they should be held liable.
Administration hawks including then-top State Department official John
Bolton demanded the same blanket exemption from liability that Russia
first granted in the early 1990s when Moscow was flat on its back.
After becoming secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice reversed course and
ordered her aides to accept the Russian position. But other issues,
including who will pay to run Russia's fuel plant, need to be settled
before construction begins in the two countries. Meanwhile, some U.S.
officials say privately that if the program is delayed much longer, the
White House -- which is looking for cost savings in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina -- could pull the plug on the American plant. That
would probably kill the entire project.
The effort to fill the Mayak warehouse has gotten caught up in a
similar swirl of bureaucracy and mistrust.
Fears of man-made disasters and government malfeasance are all too
familiar around here. In 1948 engineers from Ozersk dumped highly
radioactive waste into the nearby Techa River, contaminating 100,000
people in farming villages downstream. When a nuclear waste tank
exploded in 1957 it spewed radioactivity across a large swath of
countryside. The Soviet government bulldozed entire villages, but only
months and sometimes years after the accidents happened. Others were
left standing, prompting some people to suspect they were being used as
guinea pigs to test the effects of radiation.
Russia first raised the idea of a huge warehouse in 1991. It warned
that to meet its treaty commitments it would need a secure place to
keep all the nuclear material coming out of deactivated warheads. In
December 2003, the huge concrete structure in Ozersk was finally
completed after many delays caused by debates over location, design and
funding.
'Transparency' Agreement
Wa****ngton and Moscow have yet to complete a "transparency" agreement.
It would lay out how the U.S. will ensure the hermetically sealed
stainless-steel containers being loaded into the warehouse are filled
with weapons-grade plutonium -- without learning the precise
composition of the plutonium used in Russian warheads.
U=2ES. officials say the two sides have agreed in principle on the
monitoring technology. The Pentagon has sent two letters in recent
months to Russia insisting that loading can proceed even without an
agreement. Mr. Kuchinov of the Russian atomic agency says that might be
theoretically so but "nevertheless we are trying to have an agreement."
Another unsettled issue is how much plutonium the warehouse should
hold. American scientists say it can safely store up to 100 metric
tons. But the U.S. is also insisting that any plutonium stored there
can only be removed if it's on the way to being destroyed rather than
recycled into weapons. Under those conditions Russian officials say
they're only prepared to store 25 metric tons, all of it slated to be
burned if the fuel plant is ever built.
Meanwhile, political resistance to the facility is growing. Russian
nationalists denounce it as a way to lure the country into storing all
of its weapons stocks in one vulnerable basket, while environmentalists
claim the massive building is so flimsy that a single intruder with a
grenade could set off an explosion that would pollute half of Europe.
The allegations have been trumpeted by members of parliament and in a
recent Moscow television expos=E9 by a popular tabloid journalist.
The history of nuclear accidents weighs heavily on German Lukashen, a
member of Ozersk's city council. He says he considers the U.S. a friend
but questions whether it has done all it can to make the warehouse
safe. "If they had the security systems and the environmental controls,
then it would all be different," he says. He wants to produce a Web
site recounting the alleged problems including an online computer game
in which people would try to defend the warehouse from attackers.
The U.S. and Russian governments have done little to allay those fears.
A Pentagon-commissioned study completed last year pronounces the
facility structurally safe from most accidents and disasters, but the
study hasn't been released publicly. (The study didn't consider insider
theft or terrorism.) On the Russian side, Mr. Kuchinov says "it's
useless" trying to rebut sensationalist charges.
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