SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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2004
[H.A.S.C. No. 108–19]
COMBATING PROLIFERATION
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
MARCH 17, 2004
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Eighth Congress
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
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CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD P. ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
KEN CALVERT, California
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
ED SCHROCK, Virginia
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
JEFF MILLER, Florida
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JEB BRADLEY, New Hampshire
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ROB BISHOP, Utah
MICHAEL TURNER, Ohio
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan
PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
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JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
STEVE ISRAEL, New York
RICK LARSEN, Washington
JIM COOPER, Tennessee
JIM MARSHALL, Georgia
KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida
MADELEINE Z. BORDALLO, Guam
RODNEY ALEXANDER, Louisiana
TIM RYAN, Ohio
Robert S. Rangel, Staff Director
James M. Lariviere, Professional Staff Member
Justin Bernier, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
HEARING:
Wednesday, March 17, 2004, Combating the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
APPENDIX:
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Wednesday, March 17, 2004
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2004
COMBATING THE PROLIFERATION OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Carter, Hon. Ashton B., Director, Preventive Defense Project, Harvard University
Milhollin, Gary, Director, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control
Wortzel, Dr. Larry, Vice President and Director, The Heritage Foundation Davis Institute for International Policy Studies
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The prepared statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
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Carter, Hon. Ashton B.
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Milhollin, Gary
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Wortzel, Dr. Larry
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Memorandum dated August 31, 1998 from Shirley A. Kan, Specialist in National Security Policy, Foreign Affairs, Congressional Research, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 20540
Memorandum dated April 22, 2004 from Shirley A. Kan, Specialist in National Security Policy, and Sharon Squassoni, Specialist in National Defense, Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division, Congressional Research, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 20540
Nukes 'R' US dated March 4, 2004 from Gary Milhollin, Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and Kelly Motz, Associate Director of the Wisconsin Project
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
COMBATING THE PROLIFERATION OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, March 17, 2004.
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The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in room 2118 Rayburn, Hon. Duncan Hunter (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CURT WELDON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. WELDON [presiding]. Good morning. Chairman Hunter is in conference, so I will begin the hearing.
This morning the committee meets to examine what steps the United States should take to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Our witnesses are Gary Milhollin, Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control; Dr. Larry Wortzel, Vice President and Director of the Heritage Foundation Davis Institute for International Policy Studies; and the Honorable Ashton Carter, Director, Preventive Defense Project, Harvard University.
Welcome to the committee, gentlemen. We all look forward to your testimony and appreciate your willingness to appear before the committee.
Since September 11, the Administration has identified the nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction as the key threat facing this country in the 21st Century. That threat arises from the intersection of two trends. First, terrorists are increasingly ambitious in their tactics, seeking ever higher numbers of casualties to dramatize their cause.
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Second, technology and globalization are making it easier for weak states and terrorist groups to acquire the means of inflicting mass casualties. Therefore, the question before us is this: What should we do as a nation to prevent these two trends from resulting in a horrendous attack on innocent men, women and children.
For a long time, this committee has focused its efforts on the Cooperative Threat Reduction and Nuclear Nonproliferation Programs of the Departments of Defense and Energy. While those programs have a role to play, the country needs an approach that employs every tool at its disposal.
The Administration has developed just such a comprehensive strategy. Announced in December of 2002, it has 3 pillars: Counterproliferation to deter and defend against the use of weapons of mass destruction; strengthen nonproliferation regimes to prevent their spread; and consequence management to respond to their use.
Almost immediately, the Administration began fleshing out that strategy. It initiated multi-pronged diplomatic initiatives to constrain the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. It took action to eliminate a regime with a history of using chemical weapons. It brought initiatives before the United Nations (U.N.) calling on states to improve their domestic controls on exports of sensitive technologies and sought to criminalize the international trafficking in weapons of mass destruction and their technologies. Finally, it launched the multilateral Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to increase international cooperation and interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction and associated technologies.
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Clearly, the increased attention to weapons of mass destruction got the attention of some traditional rogue states. This past winter, Libya renounced its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and began cooperating with American and British personnel to end its nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities. Facing American diplomatic and economic pressure backed by a willingness to use military might against rogue dictators, Khadafi realized that his country would be safer and more prosperous if it gave up its WMD programs.
With Libya's decision to begin the process of rejoining the civilized world, the Bush Administration's strategy is paying off, resulting in a safer planet and a safer United States. Success in Libya proves that our strategy must be comprehensive and combine diplomatic, political, economic and military means to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
However, while the progress in Libya is an encouraging first step, we still face monumental challenges in applying every policy tool at our disposal if we are to succeed in denying this dangerous capability to our adversaries. I look forward to hearing our witnesses' thoughts on where we are today in this effort as well as what further steps should be taken to achieve this goal.
First, let me recognize the committee's distinguished ranking Democrat, Mr. Ike Skelton for any remarks he may wish to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and I join you in welcoming our outstanding witnesses today, and let me commend you for this hearing, because it is a very important topic.
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a critical challenge to our national security, no question about it. The challenges in this area dominate headlines, and the question of Iraq's missing weapons, to the network run by A.Q. Khan of Pakistan that seems to have spread their nuclear knowledge to several regions, to Libya's recent decision to give up its weapons, to the ongoing potential dangers posed by North Korea and, of course, Iran. It is clear that our security depends on figuring out how to deal with these challenges.
It is also clear that dealing with them successfully will require a multi-faceted strategy. Some elements of this strategy, like the Nunn-Lugar programs, have a decade of achievement under their belt. This committee showed our confidence in these programs last year by voting to expand their authority to take some actions beyond the former Soviet Union.
The Administration's new Proliferation Security Initiative is bringing together new partners to share intelligence and interdict weapons when nonproliferation fails, a critical component of any strategy. The President's recent speech on combating proliferation laid out excellent goals, but the effects of these goals must be matched by sustained action. Effective nonproliferation programs must be expanded and diplomacy must be consistent to ensure that our allies and friends are with us in this cause.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
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The CHAIRMAN [presiding]. I thank the gentleman.
I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for running the show here.
And Mr. Milhollin, great to have you back again. You have helped us many times in the past. Floor is yours, sir.
STATEMENT OF GARY MILHOLLIN, DIRECTOR, WISCONSIN PROJECT ON NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LAW SCHOOL
Mr. MILHOLLIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I, of course, am very honored and pleased to appear before the committee.
I would like to ask a recent article written by my organization be included in the record before I begin.
[The information referred to can be viewed in hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection. In fact, all of the statements will be taken into the record.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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The committee has asked me today to discuss three subjects: First, the status of worldwide export controls; second, the proposals on nonproliferation made by President Bush in his speech on February 11; and third, the effort my organization is making to help countries improve their performance in export control in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
I would like to start by just pointing to the amazing nuclear smuggling network that we have been reading about in the newspapers. The network, as we know, supplied the means to make enriched uranium to Iran, Libya and North Korea for more than a decade. It gave Libya a tested bomb design and may have given the same to other countries.
The most important thing about this network is that it succeeded. United States—our failure to stop it or detect it should be considered as a great national security disaster, in my opinion.
Let us look at the timetable. President Musharraf of Pakistan says that he did not learn the details of this network from U.S. intelligence until last October. North Korea was not confronted until 2002, and Iran's centrifuge factory did not become a public issue until the Uranium Resistance published it in 2002.
This means that we, the West, we're about a decade late in confronting both Pakistan and Iran—and several years later, in confronting North Korea—if we measure the time from when this network began doing its nefarious work. I think we ought to ask the question, what our government was doing, what other Western governments were doing during this time.
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Either we did not detect this network or we did not do anything effective to thwart it. And this is not a partisan subject. This period spans three U.S. administrations. I think the country and certainly the Congress deserve to know why this network succeeded so well for so long without being interrupted.
So I guess my first point is, I think there is some work to do, perhaps for this committee, perhaps for Congress.
Second point I would like to make is that the actors in this black market operated pretty much outside of the worldwide export control system. The network was overseen by a Pakistani. It was operated from Dubai, and it ordered parts to be made in Malaysia. None of these countries belong to the world's export control regimes.
It is perfectly legal to ship centrifuge parts from any of these countries to Iran or Libya without any restriction. This is true even though Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) belong to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). In my opinion, this is a serious loophole.
The CHAIRMAN. Which countries, Mr. Milhollin, is it legal to ship the centrifuge parts from?
Mr. MILHOLLIN. From just about anywhere, unfortunately, but certainly from Malaysia and the UAE as long as the recipient is a member of the NPT. And that is the case for both Iran and Libya.
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So what we have is a system that isn't really adequate to stop this sort of traffic. And we need to do something about that.
The second thing I would like to talk about—the committee asked me to talk about—are the President's proposals. The President's proposals unfortunately don't close this loophole. The President's proposal made on February 11 is addressed to what is called the Nuclear Suppliers Group. It is a group of 40 countries that agree to restrict their nuclear exports.
Under the President's proposal, these countries could not sell the means to make plutonium or enriched uranium to any country that could not already do so. It turns out that Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea—these are the most recent members—recently joined members of the nuclear club—can all do that already. So it is not clear what impact this proposal would have on any of them.
The proposal also bars nuclear exports to any country that has not adopted what is called the Additional Protocol. That is a protocol that is attached to the inspection arrangements of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
This would be a step forward, but unfortunately, the United States does not adhere to the protocol yet and neither—and that is also true of many other countries. So I would say that the President's proposals are all good as far as they go, but I don't think they will stop the kind of nuclear black market we have just read about in the newspapers. In particular, they would not stop the sale of centrifuge parts to Iran, Libya or Syria from places like Malaysia or Dubai or a number of other places.
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So how do we close this loophole? One way to do it would be to get all nations to adopt the Protocol. That protocol says that, if a country exports such things as centrifuge parts, it must tell the International Atomic Energy Agency about it and then the agency can inspect those parts after they arrive.
A second step that I recommend is to put more pressure on retransfer points such as Dubai. In the article I submitted for the record, there is a long list of retransfers that have occurred through Dubai, going back to about 20 years. Instead of just focusing on rogue regimes, we are going to have to put pressure on places that allow those regimes to buy what they need.
A third way to strengthen export controls is to help other countries improve their export control performance, and that is what my organization has been doing for the last four years. We have visited 18 countries in Europe and the former Soviet Union, and we have trained about 250 of their officials.
These countries are all faced with a number of problems. They are trying to construct good export control systems on the ruins of what they got when they were members of the East Bloc. They are basically starting with antiquated systems and trying to build something modern. Second, they are facing a lot of pressure from illicit exports coming across their borders from Russia and other places.
Despite all that, they are our first line of defense. Whether we like it or not, homeland security now begins abroad. These export control officials, border guards and licensing offices in the countries that we are trying to help are really our front line of defense against proliferation and against terrorism, and we have no choice but to help them do their jobs better.
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They are now receiving our database, which lists about 3,700 dangerous buyers in the world linked to proliferation and to terrorism. And the database also describes the sensitive products that are controlled for export. Our hope is that by using the database, our friends around the world will have a better chance of keeping dangerous goods out of the wrong hands. In the years to come, we hope to bring our database to even more countries.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Milhollin can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Milhollin, thank you. And thanks for the years that you have devoted to this real critical issue and you have spent working with us in trying to put together some safeguards, watching the controls go up and then down.
And I remember very well when you brought the post mortem after Desert Storm I, and you had the analysis, I think the only one that was published in the U.S. that showed the wherewithal or showed the genesis of Saddam Hussein's weapon systems and how most of it came from the West, some of it from U.S. companies.
You have been a great voice. Thanks for being with us today. We are going to have a lot of questions for you.
Dr. Wortzel, thank you for being with us today.
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STATEMENT OF LARRY M. WORTZEL, PH.D., VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, THE KATHRYN AND SHELBY CULLOM DAVIS INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Dr. WORTZEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the committee.
The dangers posed to the American people and our allies by weapons of mass destruction have multiplied significantly in the past few years. Military measures, such as deterrence, and political means, like arms control, which have proved effective during the Cold War, are more difficult in a world with multiple actors that have or seek such weapons.
The existence of non-state actors, such as al Qaeda, that may gain access to weapons of mass destruction significantly changes the calculus of deterrence.
For the terrorists, neither regime survival nor the survival of the state is involved in their decisions. Even personal survival is often not a consideration. Diplomatic measures in nonproliferation regimes alone will never be sufficient to curb these dangers. They lack the threat of force.
The approach taken by President Bush in the Proliferation Security Initiative is a new and important tool. A successful policy for combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction, however, depends on a combination of deterrence, defense, offensive operations and arms control, including export controls.
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The Proliferation Security Initiative has been quite successful in encouraging international cooperation on interdicting illicit trafficking of weapons. It is a creative approach that develops cooperation among states in a manner that allows each to enforce its own security programs within its own sovereign territory.
Moreover, the PSI has the attraction of being an international regime that does not attempt to create a new bureaucracy that limits national sovereignty or subordinates it to a supra-national organization.
Deterrence has been the principal means of dissuading an adversary from attacking. The strategy of mutually assured destruction was an effective way to deter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons continue to be a necessary tool to deter potential adversaries. China understands that a nuclear strike against U.S. forces in East Asia, American allies or the United States will invite swift retaliation.
But that deterrence works in cases where leaders value the survival of a nation, its population and institutions, if not their own survival. North Korea has been effectively deterred since the Korean armistice was signed in 1953, which is why President Bush is able to address the threat from Pyongyang in a patient manner with the cooperation of four other nations with an interest in peace and security in Northeast Asia.
It is imperative that the United states develop effective ballistic missile defenses and deploy them as quickly as possible. Defense minimizes the effects of the use of weapons of mass destruction and makes the threat of their delivery by enemies with minimal means less credible.
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The other measures that the Department of Homeland Security is putting in place are equally important means of defense. Border protection, ensuring that we know what foreign persons are in our country and why, and the Container Security Initiative are all defensive measures that make America safer.
Consequence management is also an important defensive measure that helps minimize the effects of any weapons of mass destruction.
Preemption has always been an option for addressing a circumstance whether a certain knowledge that a weapon of mass destruction may be used or that an attack is imminent. The right to do so is not a new principle in international law. It has been an inherent right for centuries that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully defend themselves.
I think making this explicit policy highlights this option to deter unique threats posed by rogue states or terrorists. Imagine, if you will, December 6, 1941 and the United States Forces observed the assembled Japanese fleet preparing to launch armed aircraft off of the shores of Hawaii. No rational person would argue that attacking those Japanese aircraft and ships would have violated international law.
A policy of preemption, though, is dependent on accurate intelligence. Today, the international community will question the legitimacy of any future preemptive action unless we have a credible intelligence community.
But I think the explicit statement of this policy serves a notice to terrorists and rogue states that they cannot prepare an attack against America with impunity.
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Other offensive measures include the development of new warheads that will penetrate hardened facilities and special warheads that may be effective in wiping out stocks of biological agents. It would be ideal to develop such new weapons without testing, but most of the experts don't believe it is possible to build a new nuclear weapon otherwise.
If testing is required at some future time, the President should not hesitate to do so.
Arms control shrinks the universe of threats. International arms control treaties obtain their legitimacy from a record of contributing to the realization of nonproliferation or disarmament goals.
But the weakness of depending too heavily on arms control is that an unbalanced policy will weaken the other tools for combating the spread of weapons.
Export controls for technologies with application for WMD are also important arms control measures, and the United States should continue to pursue such controls with friends and allies.
Cooperative Threat Reduction is also an important component of arms control. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is a reasonably successful set of measures that are effective in eliminating threats in the former Soviet republics at a reasonable cost to the American people.
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In the end, arms control measures must be verifiable, and they can't be part of a guessing game. The lesson of this cooperation should not be lost on North Korea. Pyongyang faces serious choices. It can continue to be a failed state or it can integrate itself into the international system.
The multilateral approach to North Korea taken by President Bush based on patient diplomacy and the withholding of fuel and financial aid until North Korea agrees to a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear programs is a correct approach.
The United States seeks to promote democracy, economic freedom and human rights around the world. Seeking regime change and dictatorships or state sponsors of terrorism is a positive thing, and that regime change can come in a variety of ways: Popular action by citizens, sanctions, covert actions, public diplomacy and moral suasion.
It does not mean that a regime change must be immediate, nor does it have to be a policy dependent on military means. But the mere threat of regime change may lead to positive outcomes in the nonproliferation area.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing. The threat of WMD cannot be addressed with one simple approach. The United States has a number of tools available in the form of verifiable Cooperative Threat Reduction, export controls, arms control regimes, deterrence, active and passive defenses, offensive action when an attack is imminent, working to change hostile regimes and ballistic missile defense. Your attention to the subject, your support for such a process and your active oversight of these matters makes America a safer place.
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[The prepared statement of Dr. Wortzel can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Dr. Wortzel.
Dr. Carter, thank you for being with us today.
STATEMENT OF ASHTON B. CARTER, CO-DIRECTOR, PREVENTIVE DEFENSE PROJECT, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Dr. CARTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members, for having me here today and being here yourselves.
I am going to step back in this statement, as I did last week before the Senate, from the hot spots of weapons of mass destruction today, the North Koreas, the Irans, the A.Q. Khan network, the so-called missing WMD in Iraq to the underlying programs and policies of the United states for countering proliferation, including some that are the special province of this committee.
I was, as you may know, very involved in launching the Counterproliferation Initiative in the Department of Defense (DOD) about ten years ago when there were few hawks on this subject. You have framed this hearing, I think, very constructively to be broad and not just to focus on the rogues, but the underlying programs.
Dealing with the rogues is vitally important, but it is not the totality of the kind of counterproliferation policy that we need. And a clear indication that that is the case, that is that our approach to counterproliferation can't begin and end with the rogues, I always remind people is the following: Of the almost 200 nations on earth, almost all of them have not, in fact, resorted to weapons of mass destruction. Now, there is Arthur Conan Doyle's novel in which Sherlock Holmes finds a vital clue to a murder in the fact that the dog at the scene of the crime didn't bark and in a similar way—and I will start on this note—I think we should see a clue to one aspect of a successful counterproliferation policy in the fact that countries such as Germany, Japan, Turkey, South Korea and Taiwan have not resorted to weapons of mass destruction, and they have not done so because they were dissuaded from doing so by a stable alliance relationship with the United states that offered them greater security than did weapons of mass destruction.
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This is something the United states has been doing right, and we need to keep doing right. And I mention that because, as I will say little bit later, I have some concerns today about the health of our alliances and security partnerships.
Now, other nations have foregone weapons of mass destruction as part of a disarmament agreement, like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which ensures them if they forego weapons of mass destruction, their neighbors will also. Disarmament regimes need to be updated and strengthened—I will say a little bit more about that later—so that they offer credible protection.
But if they can be updated in that way, they are also part of the counterproliferation strategy. And when dissuasion and disarmament fail and a nation heads down the road to weapons of mass destruction acquisition, focused diplomacy by the United States can sometimes reverse its course.
Recent decades give lots of examples of this: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus after the collapse of the Soviet Union; South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980's; Argentina and Brazil in the 1990's; and we believe Libya today.
But some proliferators can't be turned back, and at that point, our approach must be to deny them the means to get weapons of mass destruction, that is, keeping the worst weapons out of the hands of the worst people, to paraphrase President Bush. That is where export controls, covert action, the new Proliferation Security Initiative and the highly successful Nunn-Lugar program all contribute to a strategy of denial.
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Sometimes dissuasion, disarmament, diplomacy and denial don't work, and despite our best efforts, proliferation occurs. It was important to me when I was in the Department of Defense that U.S. efforts to counter weapons of mass destruction not end when nonproliferation had failed. And that is why we coined the word counterproliferation.
At that point when nonproliferation has failed, we need to offer protection to our forces, people and allies against weapons of mass destruction. Accidental and unauthorized use can be prevented through so-called diffusing measures, elimination of hair-trigger alert postures and improved permissive action link technology and so forth if you are worried about unauthorized use in Russia, for example, or between India and Pakistan.
And with respect to deliberate use, the United States should, in my judgment, continue its current policy of threatening overwhelming and devastating retaliation against anyone who uses nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us, since, at least in some cases, deterrence of this kind might be effective.
Where deterrence fails, defenses ranging from chemical suits, inhalation masks and vaccines to ballistic missile defenses are needed.
And finally, where the risk of use of weapons of mass destruction is imminent, preemptive destruction of hostile weapons of mass destruction might be a necessary last resort.
So, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, dissuasion, disarmament, diplomacy, denial, diffusing, deterrence, defenses, destruction—what the Department of Defense calls the eight Ds—are the tools of the comprehensive counterproliferation policy.
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And besides being an easy jog to the memory, the eight Ds are a reminder that there is no silver bullet in this game; not preemption, not arms control, not any other single tool. From listening to the public debate, one might come to believe that one of these tools holds the key to protection against proliferation. But the dynamics driving proliferation in different countries are different enough that no single label, no single doctrine can cover them all.
One might also infer from the public debate that the eight Ds are competing alternative doctrines when, in fact, we need them all. So what would today's counterproliferation hawk be trying to do? Not choose among the Ds, but strengthen all of the Ds, all of the tools in our tool box, and many of them are in need of fundamental overhaul, not in good shape.
One reason for that is that we have not, I don't believe, fully heeded one of the lessons of 9/11, which is that counterproliferation and counterterrorism are deeply linked in the 21st century. Those of us who have had the experience in travelling to North Korea—and I know that includes a number of members here in addition to myself—have to be concerned not only about what Kim Jong Il might do with nuclear weapons he obtains from the plutonium he is processing, but also about the other hands into which North Korea's nukes might someday fall, either through sale or in the chaos of collapse of the North Korean regime.
The half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,400 years. Now, I don't know how long the North Korean regime is going to last, but I seriously doubt it is that long. And therefore, you have to ask, what after Kim Jong Il, because the material will still be there.
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Today's proliferation threat is tomorrow's catastrophic terrorism threat. Who among us would not now give a great deal to turn back the clock to the 1980's and stop the Pakistani nuclear program, which poses us everyday with the danger of Talibanization, which would be a nightmare scenario? Who would not turn back the clock to do that if we could?
9/11 should have caused us to overhaul our approach to counterproliferation as fundamentally we have overhauled our approach to counterterrorism. But so far, the worst people have gotten all of the attention, and the worst weapons have not.
I would like to close, Mr. Chairman, by recommending to you, as my statement does, seven areas of overhaul of the counterproliferation tool box, seven things we should be doing to fight the war against proliferation as vigorously as we are fighting the war against terrorism. The statement elaborates on each. I will simply enumerate them in the interest of time.
The first is to shore up our alliances, particularly our military alliances and our partnerships. I mentioned that before in connection with dissuasion.
The second is to expand the scale and scope of Nunn-Lugar, which is now recognized to be not just the DOD program as it began—and I was involved in that program for dealing with the former Soviet Union—but an entire methodology for approaching weapons of mass destruction, powerful tool.
I believe at the time that the United States formed a coalition against al Qaeda after 9/11, we should have formed a global coalition against weapons of mass destruction via an expansion of the Nunn-Lugar program. Nunn-Lugar is much praised but little supported in Washington and other capitals, for that matter. Here, there are tenacious opponents in the Congress and even in the Administration, 2.5 years after 9/11's unmistakable wake-up call and despite the fact that President Bush has repeatedly voiced his own support for the program.
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Third, update and upgrade the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Recently, Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, Arnold Kantor and I published an op-ed in the New York Times, which I have appended to my statement, which made a proposal for the fundamental updating of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Dr. CARTER. And I am pleased to say, in President Bush's National Defense University speech, he paralleled the ideas in that op-ed. I commend them to your attention, and I hope they are implemented vigorously.
Fourth, and something of particular interest to this committee, I think, make counterproliferation an integral part of Pentagon transformation. We talk about transformation, and transformation is terribly important, but if you look at what we do, it is mostly conventional warfare. It is perfecting joint operations—excellent thing to do—precisions strike, application of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) to warfare—all excellent stuff.
My own belief is that we should also be as vigorously trying to transform our capacities for dealing with weapons of mass destruction in the battlefield and in other areas. I was involved in the establishment of several programs in that connection, and I look at them today, and they are as fragmented, poorly supported and managed now as they were then. And so if we talk about transforming the Pentagon and weapons of mass destruction are our principal threat, where is the part of transformation that deals with weapons of mass destruction?
Fifth and next, same statement applied to homeland security. Big homeland security program. If weapons of mass destruction terrorism is as it is, the worst kind of terrorism, where in our homeland security system is a new, broad and vigorous effort specifically targeted at weapons of mass destruction? You can find it, but you have to dig, and it is not broad and vigorous.
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Sixth, weigh carefully the pros and cons of further innovations in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. I can say more about that in discussion. But that is a matter of a balancing act that I am not sure we have done well recently.
Seventh and finally, on this note, I will close, overhaul weapons of mass destruction intelligence. I was one of the people who believed—and I don't think I had any alternative to believe—last year that the war in Iraq was necessary because of the weapons of mass destruction issue. And I told my wife—I was telling one of my co-witnesses earlier today, that we would find the goods in the aftermath of the war that would vindicate my support. And she is still after me, and I don't want to revisit that issue here.
There are a number of responsible people looking into that. And I am making a larger point, weapons of mass destruction are difficult to find. They are a difficult intelligence target, and it is crucial we not live in a missile gap in the future where our unknowns outweigh our knowns in the subject matter of our security that is of the most fundamental importance to us.
And again, I have some recommendations in here about how to approach that general problem. Just get beyond Iraq, pick ourselves up, move on and try to be constructive about that issue.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, the war on terrorism and the war on proliferation are linked, but they are not the same thing. They are not identical. So far, we are waging a war on terrorism; we are not waging, yet, a war on weapons of mass destruction. We are attacking the worst people much more than we are attacking the worst weapons. And I hope this hearing contributes to a launch of a war on weapons of mass destruction and an overhaul of our counterproliferation policies that is as far reaching as the one we have undertaken of our counterterrorism policies and that the seven measures that I have listed and elaborated on in my statement provide an agenda of action. Thank you.
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[The prepared statement of Dr. Carter may be viewed in hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Dr. Carter.
And I am informed that Mrs. Milhollin and Gary's wife and daughter are here in the front row.
Ladies, thank you for being with us, sitting next to my cousin here, Morgan. Thanks for being here, and you have to know that Gary Milhollin does some of the most important work that anyone does in this country and has done it for years, and you have to be very proud of him.
Gary, nice of you to bring the family in, and I am sure that you are going to spring for a big steak for your wife and daughter here as soon as this is over.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. I would like for it to be known that I just discovered that they planned to come. So you were better informed than I was.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Carter, you mentioned—you said that one form of counterproliferation is the D of dissuading a nation from pursuing those programs partly in contemplation of the prospect of a better relationship in the community of nations and with the United States, that that is something that we should be able to do well. Isn't that what we just did with Libya?
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Dr. CARTER. I hope that, in part, the thinking of Colonel Khadafi was influenced by what we did in Iraq and by our clear determination to be strong on weapons of mass destruction.
However, Mr. Chairman, I don't think we yet know everything that went into Colonel Khadafi's thinking. I am loath to speculate on all the ingredients of his thinking.
The CHAIRMAN. That is a pattern of the model that we followed. There were some carrots in there as well as the prospect of climbing out of a spider hole at some point that he probably thought about when he was mowing the grass on the back 40.
Dr. CARTER. I hope it is a triumph, and I actually believe it is a triumph of our diplomacy, but time will tell whether he fully implements his promises.
The CHAIRMAN. Another question and then I wanted to get to Mr. Milhollin, but Nunn-Lugar is in the big sense a wonderful thing, the idea of us paying to take the bullets out of a gun of a potential adversary.
In practice, there are always problems, as you know, when somebody else pays the bill. We receive—many times get the budget from the Services, and they will not have funded something because they knew that Congress was going to fund it and would be inclined to fund it if they didn't, so they use their funds for something else. It is a stroke of genius if you pay the last dollar that takes that 44-Magnum bullet out of your adversary's gun. It is probably not being very smart if you pay him for the bullet, and he goes down to the hardware store and buys another box of bullets.
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And so as I watch the funding that is appropriated by the Russians for weapons disposal, you can see, to some degree, the fact that we are paying for these programs and are inclined to pay for them and worried about them—and not lost on folks on whether they have roads to build and they have public works projects to do.
I am reminded of the two projects at Votkinsk and Krasnoyarsk where we built, literally built a heptyl neutralization plant for $100 million. And at the ribbon-cutting, the Russians saddled up to us and said, ''We forgot to tell you something. There isn't any heptyl, and there hadn't been for a long time. We spent it on the space program, but thanks for the $100 million project.''
And a short distance away at Votkinsk, we spent another $100 million for all of the site work to be done at another neutralization facility, and the Russians had saddled up to us after the $100 million had been spent and said, ''We forgot to tell you something, that the City of Votkinsk decided they didn't want to issue the necessary permits to build this plant.'' So I think that scrutiny is something that is vitally needed here.
One thing we have injected into the language last year that just drew all kinds of howls from the proliferation advocates was that I put in language that says you have to have a site manager. When you have this massive construction project, the idea that you don't have any site manager who knows how much has been spent or is being spent or whether you got the permits in hand before you break ground is a senseless thing. If you did that on a project in the United States, we would have them up before every committee in Congress asking what happened to the taxpayers' dollars. Oversight, I think is important.
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And the other troubling aspect of this that I think needs scrutiny and needs Russian accountability is the fact that we still have places where the father of Nunn-Lugar, Senator Lugar, cannot go, which is the new weapons facilities which may be making biological agents.
So if we look back on this from the perspective of history and see that, instead of taking that .357-Magnum shell out of the chamber, we ended up simply sending money, and that money, in fact, was used to build more systems to get rid of some stuff symbolically but basically to make the weapons of mass destruction program, the strategic programs, more vital and more capable, then we will have failed.
And I think that is a balancing act that doesn't fit on bumper strips and doesn't even fit in a lot of the editorials that come out against anybody who doesn't just push money into the Soviet Union. The $200 million white elephants have certainly raised the requirement that with those kinds of dollars being absolutely wasted that could have been used for good stuff, we have to have more scrutiny in this program. What do you think?
Dr. CARTER. I would like to respond to that with two points, Mr. Chairman. The first is that the part of the expansion of the scale and scope of the Nunn-Lugar program to which I was referring was outside of Russia. I think this is a technique that in Libya, in Iraq and, when the time comes, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, I hope, the many countries where there are supplies of highly enriched uranium of weapons quality around the world, this is an approach that can be used very broadly.
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And in the case of nuclear materials, that is a finite problem. We know that every gram of plutonium 239 and highly enriched uranium has been made by governments and, in principle, can be accounted by them. Even though nuclear terrorism is our most fearsome danger, it is a bounded one, and the Nunn-Lugar approach gives us the possibility of eliminating that, and it is very powerful.
Let me respond to your points about Russia. Yes, there have been problems. There always will be in something of that scale. I believe that the balance that you were referring to is terribly important. I don't think we are striking that balance today. I think that the program is laboring under too many restrictions. And the analogy that I would make is to Mr. Bremer, excellent fellow and friend of mine over in Iraq. I dare say, out of the money he is spending in Iraq, there will be $100 million here and $100 million there that becomes a cropper also. And I think that he could come back and say to us——
The CHAIRMAN. But he is going to have a site manager at every project.
Dr. CARTER. He could come back and say to us, ''Well, the Shiites are a problem and the Sunnis are a problem,'' and they say this and they say that, and our answer to him, I think rightly, should be, we are looking for a program that is success-oriented and keeps moving forward.
So I would like to see us undertake the Nunn-Lugar program in Russia in the same spirit, which is not allowing the Russians to present obstacles we can't get over and not in constantly encumbering our program managers. And I think if we did that, we would have a program that was moving forward more briskly in Russia and that we would have more confidence to expand outside of Russia.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
And Mr. Milhollin, just briefly, your statement that we have some major inadequacies—I listened to Dr. Wortzel, who felt there are a number of things that we do right. But clearly, you feel that the uranium section in the Administration's proposal is inadequate. Could you simply explain that again to us?
Mr. MILHOLLIN. Yes. The President's proposal is really aimed at the law-abiding countries of the world. It is aimed at the Nuclear Suppliers Group and would limit what they could sell to countries like Malaysia, for example.
But the problem we have seen with Malaysia is what Malaysia is selling to Libya, that is the problem; that is, if we restrict what the United States, France, Japan and so forth sell to people, that is, we restrict the kind of nuclear usable equipment or materials that can be sold, it doesn't get at this problem of setting up a network around the world.
The CHAIRMAN. You are saying we are totally missing the pass-through?
Mr. MILHOLLIN. We are not aiming at the black market target. And that is our problem, and we are not going to stop that until we lean on places like Dubai to stop being transfer points and to get rules in place in the world, so if you set up a factory in country x that is exporting centrifuge parts somewhere, that country x has to reveal that that is happening at least.
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The CHAIRMAN. You think we have to have a new structure that is utilized for this new era of terrorists with high technology.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. Yes. I think our export control systems in the world are still behind. They are Cold War products, and they are not designed to take on the kind of terrorist networks that we are seeing—I won't say terrorists, but nuclear black market networks—we are seeing crop up, and we have to work on that.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder.
Dr. SNYDER. There were people here before I was here. Am I mistaken?
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Ortiz, the gentleman from Texas.
Mr. ORTIZ. I came in late, and I agree my good friend was here before I came in.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Taylor, you have inspired a lot of enthusiasm here.
Mr. TAYLOR. I want to thank you, gentlemen, for being here and sharing your valuable time with us. I will pose two questions to you that on the surface are almost totally opposite, and I want to hear your thoughts on both of them.
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Number one, I have listened to your testimony. I have tried to read each of your statements. I don't see anything in any of them that gives me a high degree of confidence that it does anything to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. So I want to hear your thoughts on that even though I am halfway through the New York Times editorial.
Second thing is, we, our Nation, the majority of people in this Congress obviously all overestimated the Iraqi stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Two or three years ago, we were given numbers of nations that we thought had one of the three or possibly all three of the three, and it was classified only to—a couple of weeks later—have it in Time Magazine. Pretty open society we have.
What are the chances that we are also overestimating the number of nations that might have them? I realize there are two very different schools of thought. One says, you can't stop and everybody is going to get it. And the second one is, maybe we have overestimated how many nations really have weapons of mass destruction.
And third, to that point, since the Iraqis have now caused close to 600 American casualties, most of them with fairly nonsophisticated weapons, 155 shell hooked to a blasting cap, hooked to a remote-controlled doorbell, what are the chances that folks will look back at that and say, why do we need to spend all that money if they can kill Americans on the cheap?
Mr. MILHOLLIN. Would you like me to go first, sir?
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Mr. TAYLOR. Whoever.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. I think maybe the first two questions I can address at the same time. Your question is, you look at our testimony and you don't see anything in it that really promises to stop proliferation.
Mr. TAYLOR. Gives me a strong degree of confidence.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. And on the other hand, maybe we are overestimating the problem, that is your second question. I think if you look at where we are today, you can see some reasons for being optimistic, and you can see some reasons for being pessimistic.
First let me give you the reasons for being optimistic. We have, in Libya, a terrific, positive example of what you can do if the world gets together and decides to isolate a country and raise the cost of proliferation and also raise the cost of supporting terrorism. I mean, Libya was looking at a bleak future. As the Chairman said, it is always risky to speculate on what people like Khadafi or Saddam Hussein might be thinking, but still it seems from what we know, he decided if his country was going to have a future, it couldn't be as an isolated country with the whole world lined up against it economically, politically and diplomatically. So he caved. He decided, ''Okay, I can't fight the Americans and their allies, so I am going to join up with the West.''
If we did that in the case of Iran; that is, if the world could come together and force Iran to take that same step, then we would have turned back two serious proliferators and we would be left only with North Korea. Then I think if that happened, we could become fairly optimistic.
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If we lose Iran; that is, if we lose Iran because we can't put that kind of a coalition and a force together, then I think it is time for the pessimistic assumption, because the Iranians with the bomb are going to make anything in the Middle East much more difficult, and it is going to give countries in the Middle East a reason to think they might go in the same direction. So I see us really at a crossroads. If we manage through successful diplomacy and resolve to turn around Iran, then I think the road is looking pretty good. If we lose Iran, then I think the road is looking pretty bad.
Dr. WORTZEL. I think you asked critical questions. I want to go back in time and use China as kind of a nexus. Now, we knew and we watched, from the mid–1980's forward, pretty much what was going on with Pakistan and China, and we had a pretty good idea of what was going on with China, Iran, Libya and North Korea and Pakistan and North Korea. I don't think we are overestimating the problem.
Now, the question is, why did we ignore it? Why, for various political reasons, for various other reasons of international policy, did we not take more forceful action whether diplomatically or covertly then? So I don't think that it is an overestimation, but I am not sure that that matters, because the use of those weapons would be devastating.
So I would, in this case, rather overestimate and have all of the other defensive measures and consequence mitigation procedures that Dr. Carter talked about in place here in case that happens and have our troops trained to respond.
Dr. WORTZEL. With respect to stopping it, we will never do that by ourselves. As long as other nations do not feel threatened by this proliferation, whether it is Europe that says, ''Well, we are not worrying, the Germans aren't worrying, because America is the target,'' or the French may not worry or the Japanese or the Chinese may not worry, because they are pretty convinced that they would never be the target of those weapons, you are not going to have as much success and progress as you could have in stopping proliferation.
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Finally, on doing it on the cheap, there are a lot of ways to kill people, some more effective than others. But, I think that, particularly with respect to nuclear weapons, a lot of these countries simply believe that it is such an important political tool, political objective and political attainment as a means of deterrence that they are going to go for it anyway unless they can be dissuaded.
Dr. CARTER. I will be very brief. The questions are profound. And as to the first one, you said there was nothing—no thing in here that gives you confidence. There is no one thing that ought to give you confidence. This is a multifaceted problem. And it is a multipronged strategy, and that is the best that you can do. You try to match each of those eight Ds to the situation you face.
There is no silver bullet. That is in the nature of things. The good news is that there are eight of these different approaches, and a wide-ranging strategy has some hope of delivering results.
If you want a little glimmer of hope, I think on the nuclear front, the glimmer of hope is the following: There are only two ways to make nuclear weapons, plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Well, I am a physicist, so there are a couple of others, but never mind.
And God has been kind to us in that those materials don't occur in nature. And he has been kind to us in that they are a hassle to make. And that means that, up until this point in human history, only governments, not al Qaeda, have made those materials. And therefore, it is within the kin of man to entirely bound the nuclear terrorism threat by policing up every gram of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. That is a finite project. You can imagine accomplishing it. And I think that ought to be our objective of this expanded program that I spoke of.
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I don't think we are underestimating the number of nations that have weapons of mass destruction. If you are suggesting that there may be other Saddam Husseins around, a rogue is someone who is up to more than he lets on. I don't know what you call somebody who is up to less than he lets on, but that was Saddam Hussein.
And I don't believe, and I certainly am not familiar with, any evidence that suggests that there are others like him.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for being here.
Mr. Chairman, four members of this committee were sitting in the room when Khadafi gave his 90-minute speech, as we sat with our mouths open, listening to this symbol of terrorism renounce weapons of mass destruction and telling us, in front of his own people on national TV, after we had addressed the same assembly, that they were going to give up all of their weapons.
And this same delegation has had briefings with the intelligence community and the State Department. And the feeling on our part as a country is overwhelmingly positive with the response that we are getting. Unlike the former Soviet states, where we have had to pull out the material, Libya has been pushing the material out to us, which is a very good sign.
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Obviously it is not the end of the game, it is only the beginning, and we will continue to verify, as opposed to taking the substance of the comments. But it was an unbelievable experience.
Mr. Chairman, my frustration, having worked 18 years on the issue of proliferation as a member of this committee, is that I don't think we set a very good example in America. And I am going to talk about that for a moment.
We have a number of arms control agreements, but our record of enforcing arms control agreements, I think, is dismal. And I think, when we look to blame other people for proliferation, we should start with ourselves. In fact, I would ask, Mr. Chairman, if you would give me unanimous consent to put in the record two documents that I had the Congressional Research Service produce in 1998, I am asking to update these at this point in time to today.
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.
[The information referred to can be viewed in hard copy.]
Mr. WELDON. These documents are a chronology of weapons-related transfers by Russia and China from 1990 until 1998 when I put them in the record. I have put them in four or five times since.
We had evidence, according to the Congressional Research Service, which my colleagues will admit is nonpartisan evidence, that 16 times we caught the Russians transferring technology to five countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and North Korea.
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Twenty-one times, we caught the Chinese transferring weapons of mass destruction to five countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea. Of the 16 times we caught Russia in violation of existing arms control treaties, we imposed the full and required sanctions one time. We imposed partial sanctions two times.
Of the 21 times that we caught China transferring weapons of mass destruction technology in violation of arms control treaties, we imposed full sanctions one time and partial sanctions two times.
Now, the Congressional Research Service has no reason to be partisan in their analysis. And obviously, there is a problem here. In fact, one of those cited was a case in 1995, when we had evidence that Russia had been transferring guidance systems for its missiles to Iraq.
I was in Moscow in January at that time, so I went to meet with Ambassador Pickering. I said, ''Mr. Ambassador, what was the Russian response when you asked them? That is a violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).''
He said, ''I haven't asked them, Congressman. That has to come from the White House.''
So I came back and I wrote to the President. He wrote me back in March and said, ''Dear Congressman Weldon, we share your concern. If this transfer alleged by The Washington Post did occur, it would be a serious violation of the MTCR. And I assure you, we are using every bit of capability that we have to determine whether or not it is true. And if we do, we will impose the required sanctions. But, Congressman, we have no evidence.''
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Well, I have probably taken these devices to a thousand meetings. This is my—and all of my Members are laughing at me. This a Soviet gyroscope; this is a Soviet accelerometer. These are the heart of a missile guidance system, as all of my friends here know. These systems were taken off of SSN–19 Soviet missiles and should have been destroyed. We caught them being transferred to Iraq three times, and we never imposed sanctions. Never imposed the sanctions.
What kind of a signal does that send to Russia? What kind of signal does that send to those retired generals and admirals when Alexander Levitt told my delegation about, in May of 1997 in Moscow and here before this committee in 1998, how their selling off technology to our enemies to raise money to support their families?
My point is a simple one. We better start looking at the way that we enforce treaties if we are going to be seriously effective in controlling proliferation.
In fact, Mr. Chairman, it was the U.S. in the 1990's—I was on the Cox Committee—who basically gave China every bit of technology they desired, from separation-stage technology to advanced high-speed super computers to technology associated—and the vote on the committee was nine to zero on that. Our security was severely harmed.
My point is that proliferation cannot be successful unless we in this country take it seriously. And so, my question to our colleagues is, first of all, people say, ''Well, you can't always impose the required conditions of a treaty.''
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Well, then maybe we should do what Henry Sokolski proposed back six years ago and have a phased-in process. I went to the Clinton Administration and said, ''If you don't want to enforce the full terms of a treaty, then maybe we should give you conditional efforts that you can impose.'' and they said, ''We don't need that.''
Well, the point is, you can't have it every way. If you have a violation of a treaty, as documented 38 times—that is just up until 1998. From 1998 to 2004, it is going to be a lot more. And I will have those all for the Congressional Record in a short period of time. But, if you are not going to impose the requirements of the treaty, my question is, what good is the treaty?
And if the Administration says, ''Well, we want flexibility so that we can get some other kind of compliance,'' which was what was argued to us back in 1997 when we caught Russia helping the Iranians build the Shahab–3 missile system, we were told, ''Don't worry, Yeltsin is making good efforts; he has issued this Presidential decree,'' which wasn't worth a hill of beans, because now the Shahab–3 system is built. It is deployed.
And it was built and deployed with Russian help. So my point is, should we change treaties to give flexibility to administrations to impose partial sanctions, or should we just not worry about how we enforce treaties, because it really doesn't matter as it was in the 38 times that I mentioned here and numerous other times since, where we have not imposed—even when the U.N. from time to time has imposed sanctions, we didn't as a nation?
My second point is that the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is a good program. And I have supported it, as has my Chairman. But, we want more transparency. The Russians maintain that there is a minimum of 30 percent abuse in the money—U.S. taxpayers' money going into Russia. I will place on the record in the next several months a number of additional examples besides the ones that Chairman Hunter has referred to, where Russian generals have been caught diverting money to their subordinate relatives who are running plants, buying material that is sitting in warehouses paid for with U.S. tax dollars.
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And I will put evidence on the record of quick fix systems that were paid for by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a lack of coordination of DOD and DTRA money with the 12th Main Directorate. These stories aren't coming from the U.S. Inspector General; these stories are coming from my Russian friends who have told me that this is significant waste caused by the U.S. oversight of this program.
So what we have to do is look for ways to create new paradigms in the way that we get access to sites. We have never got into Sergiyev Posad. Sergiyev Posad is a site that we have to get into. And if we can't get access to that system, then why are we spending a billion dollars a year on Russia? We have never had a human being set foot in the underground huge complex at Yamantau Mountain. If we are going to spend a billion dollars a year in Russian, we ought to get access to Yamantau Mountain.
Now, last August, two of my colleagues went with me to Krasnoyarsk–26 to Zheleznogorsk. We were the first officials to be admitted to the mountain where the Soviets built three of the largest plutonium producing reactors, have shut down two and have pledged to shut down the third.
But, while we were there, and my friends Mr. Reyes and Mr. Ortiz were with me, they will tell you the story—what did the Russians say to us? And we had no State Department officials with us, no DOE officials, because they couldn't get into Krasnoyarsk–26, but we were there. We had an 0&R official with us. What did they tell us? ''our weapons grade plutonium stored in this mountain we don't think is safe, because the guard, the military guards, have been replaced by civilians.'' Mr. Reyes, you were there.
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They told us the storage units weren't capable of protecting against the Chechen terrorists that might invade that site. And so I would say to you in the discussion of programs like Cooperative Threat Reduction, it is not just enough to say they are good; they are good. It is not just enough to say that they are effective; they are effective.
But, it is time to go beyond that. It is time to challenge the Russians at the highest level to give us access to sites we can't get access to. And it is time to have the Russians create with us a transparent system of dollars so that no American money flows into Russia until the terms of a contractual relationship have been completed on the Russian side, and then the money flows over.
Some would say that is impossible. Well, we have already briefed the Vice President's Office, Linton Brooks, the head of DTRA, and Richard Armitage down at State, that it is possible. And in my opinion, that is the direction that we should be going for, total and complete transparency, so that we don't spend a dime of U.S. money in Russia unless and until the contractual part of the Russian side has been totally and completely met. Then the U.S. dollars should flow to reimburse the Russian financial entity that funded the project at the beginning, on the terms and conditions that we agreed to upfront.
So I would ask you for a response, and I apologize for taking some time overtime, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. That is okay. Go ahead.
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Dr. Carter, I know you are aching to respond here.
Dr. CARTER. I am indeed, to the last part.
I would like to make a response to what Congressman Weldon just said, if I may, and, in effect, answer the question he asked. He posed it two ways.
One is, if we are not going to get into location X or Y, why are we there? We are there to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. That is our paramount objective, our paramount objective. And the effectiveness and momentum of the program to accomplish that goal is the paramount objective.
And the second thing you said is, we should not be spending money there unless—or rather until—all of the conditions that have been imposed are satisfied. And my concern about that is that that is a recipe for the arresting of this program. We saw this last year where we had a six-month hiatus. And my own view is that the overriding importance of preventing weapons of mass destruction from arriving on our territory truly is overriding and that, while it is important in a program of this complexity, when you are operating overseas and in a society as disrupted and subject to opacity as the Soviet—as Russia is—it is important that we get transparency and that we have accountability.
I think we have gotten to the point in this program where we have encumbered it excessively, lost momentum and are sacrificing the effectiveness which you praised. So our Chairman made—used a very good metaphor, which is the balancing of these objectives, which are to make the program effective at protecting us against weapons of mass destruction while also getting transparency and accountability.
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My own judgment is that that balance is askew, and that the paramount objective, which is protecting us from weapons of mass destruction, is not reflected in the management of the program.
Mr. WELDON. Dr. Carter, if you might—you misconstrued my statement. I am not saying to withhold funds from the existing Nunn-Lugar program. I said we need a new paradigm. The Russians have offered to us a new process that gives us total access to all of their sites, sets up a process where negotiation is held between the two parties, and they decide, and have said publicly, that they will fund the entire project on the Russian side.
When the project is done to the original terms, the money from the U.S. will replenish the Russian money expended. This is a new paradigm. I am not talking about old programs. So don't put words into my mouth that somehow I am trying to hold out money for existing Nunn-Lugar.
I am offering a new model that was brought to me by the Russians at the highest level. What I am saying is that our problems have been with the bureaucracy in both countries. They want to maintain the status quo that feeds off of the existing system.
There is a new process in Russia that has been briefed to Linton Brooks, that has been briefed to the head of DTRA, that has been briefed to not just Colin Powell but Richard Armitage, that has been briefed to Cheney's National Security Advisor, that the Russians have offered, that gives us access to all of their sites, including locations like Krasnoyarsk–26, Sergiyev Posad and a whole host of other sites that we haven't been to yet, but also has the Russians pay the bill.
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So my point is not a retro question about stopping monies. My point is, should we allow that kind of a process to be put in place as a new paradigm for the future? Would you support that, if that in fact was an option?
Dr. CARTER. I think we do need a new process for Nunn-Lugar. And let me try to describe it to you and see if we are thinking along the same lines.
Mr. WELDON. But would you also accept that premise, if the Russians offered it to us?
Dr. CARTER. I suppose so, if the Russians offered it to us. I don't know enough about what their thinking is to understand how likely it is that that will be offered.
But, you are absolutely right. The bureaucracy on both sides has hindered the program right from its inception. My own view is that the restrictions give extra opportunities to those bureaucrats to slow things down and to stop the accomplishment of the objectives of the program. What I would like to see in the way of a new paradigm is, first of all, on the U.S. side in the Executive Branch—a number people have said this over the years—more top-level managerial attention to getting the job done.
This is still a program, even though it is arguable, that addresses one of our most important national priorities, that is run from the middle levels. It wasn't true when my boss, Bill Perry, was Secretary of Defense, fortunately, but—and he always helped us out with the program. But it is run by mid-levels. I have always thought that there should be somebody in the Administration, like Bremer is with Iraq, who is tasked with making this program succeed.
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And if there were such a person, I would hope that Congress would have enough confidence in that individual and that process to give him or her the latitude to make the program a success. That is the model that I would like to see.
And if I may also, Congressman Weldon—if I may say a word about the earlier part of your statement also having to do with intelligence, which I think made a very exceedingly important point, and it was a point that Gary Milhollin touched on also, having to do with export controls.
I think it is important that we all remember that—and the drug trade teaches us—that rules and laws are only part of the battle. Then you have to have enforcement. That was the word you used, Congressman Weldon, enforcement.
And we can get everybody in the world to adopt the most wondrous export control system. If we do not have intelligence that finds people who are violating the law and we don't have governments that are willing internally to enforce the law, then all of this is just paper.
And that is what the A.Q. Khan network, I think, teaches me: Above all, it is intelligence and enforcement much more than the written rules that matter.
Thank you.
Dr. WORTZEL. Congressman, I have the greatest difficulty with the claims, particularly in China but also in Russia, now we see it in Pakistan, that these transfers, these illegal sorts of component sales and WMD sales, are the private action by an individual or a company and ought to be treated that way. And the willingness of the Executive Branch of the United States Government to accept that.
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When you have 21 violations over the course of 9 years, 16 violations over the course of 9 years, a program that was so under the control and the microscope of first the Army commander and now the President, these violations are conscious government actions. And they must be treated as such.
The United States government has to respond and handle it as such. And whatever sanctions or measures are put in place to respond, must deal with the government level. We cannot accept these excuses.
I do not believe that Musharaff had no idea what A.Q. Khan was doing. And I don't believe that the Communist Party for the Peoples Republic of China or the Central Military Commission had no idea what China Precision Machinery was doing. So that is part of a response.
Actually, I don't like the idea of a treaty phase-in. I accept that there may be some cheating. I accept that there may be hesitancy to go right along with the treaty. But, I am afraid a treaty phase-in, if negotiated like that, is going to lead to the front-end loading of whatever proliferation you are going to do. Say, if I can sell this much in the first year, I am going to get it sold. That is the end of it.
And, finally, I think that much of the discussion here goes right back to the Chairman's discussion of the need for oversight, on-site oversight, real senior leadership in a program and then knowing you have the people out there that will conduct oversight so that you know what programs you have are running right.
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Mr. MILHOLLIN. Mr. Weldon, you have asked some very good questions. As you know, over the years, you and I have pretty much agreed on the deplorable record of the United States in enforcing our sanctions laws against proliferating countries such as Russia and China. We have—our organization has its own list of Chinese and Russian export violations.
And we also both know that the people who are in charge of doing the enforcing usually think that something else is more important than enforcing the sanction. In fact, usually is probably too weak a word. Almost always they decide that something else, whatever happens to be for the moment, is more important than that. And I think that opinion will continue to exist until the first nuclear weapon goes off in the United States.
At that point, we will decide that it is truly important to stop proliferation. Of course, it will be like 9/11. When we decide that, the harm will already have happened.
But, you know, you asked about transparency in your second question. I think that transparency—I mean, I have done this, as you know, for a while; I think that both for our government and foreign governments, public humiliation is the strongest single force.
So I would urge Congress to think of a way to require that these violations be public, that is, the whole world ought to know that the Russians are exporting X, Y and Z as soon as it happens. And so if that were true, it is going to be harder for our government to push it under the rug, and it is going to be harder for the Russians to push it under the rug. It is going to have ramifications in lots of ways.
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And I think that is also true of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. I heartily endorse the idea that there ought to be transparency in that program. I would say, though, that in that program, I am afraid that we are not keying our eye always on the main risk.
Dr. Carter has said that it is theoretically possible to know how many grams of plutonium and highly enriched uranium there are in the world, because they are made by governments; they don't occur in nature. I don't think even the Russians know how many grams there are in Russia.
And I think that our efforts there ought to be pointed primarily at figuring that out first. I am not sure that they are. Before you can know how safe the most insecure fuel element in Russia is, you have to know how many fuel elements there are and where they all are.
I am not an expert on that program, but I am afraid that we have made excellent progress in some sites, but there are so many sites we haven't touched and we don't even understand. So it is—in a way, it is sort of like building a bridge halfway across a river. As you say, there is a lot to be worried about. That doesn't mean that we need to stop building the bridge. But, I think we can do a much better job of implementation.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Reyes.
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Mr. REYES. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you gentlemen for offering your perspectives here.
And I wanted to thank Chairman Weldon for including me on a lot of really interesting trips into some of these areas, North Korea, Siberia and Russia, Libya.
But, you know, I would like to approach this from kind of a little different perspective, because, you know, it seems to me that there are double standards in terms of what we require and what we do as a government. And I will give you a couple of examples.
First of all, when we talk about whether or not a site manager will be beneficial in having oversight and compliance and all of those kinds of things, the thought occurs to me that we had a site manager recently in Iraq, and Halliburton fleeced us to the tune of $27 million in terms of the overcharges for everything from meals to gasoline.
We recently went to Libya. And we were shown the great project of the man-made river by Khadafi. And when I asked them how were these giant 12-foot concrete pipelines constructed, where were they constructed and by whom, they said they were constructed in Libya by Brown & Root using a French company to do business in Libya where we had sanctions and where we had them basically isolated.
So it occurs to me that, as a government, it is a lot like being a little bit pregnant. If we can't enforce the compliance of American companies that are providing services to the United States military and we can't enforce compliance to United States companies that are providing this massive—and I will tell you it is a very impressive project—but that are working through other foreign companies and are using offshore corporation addresses and all of those kinds of things, it is very hypocritical of us to talk about Russia and to talk about China and all of those other things that are going on.
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And a lot of these things—for instance, the issue in Libya happened in the 1980's and the early 1990's. The Chinese issue happened in the 1990's with the Clinton Administration. So we have the Reagan Administration, the first Bush Administration; we have the Clinton Administration, and now with Halliburton in Iraq, we have the second Bush Administration.
So I guess my question to you, gentlemen, is, am I seeing this correctly that in order for us to do a good job in the big things, we have to do a good job in the little things? And my dad always told us, take care of the little things and the big things normally take care of themselves.
So do you agree that in terms of seeing it the way that I am seeing it, that it doesn't make any difference whether there is a Republican or Democrat in the White House, it gets down to making sure that Congress does the necessary oversight in terms of compliance, whether it is Halliburton or Brown & Root or Silicon Valley or whoever, there has to be a standard to be followed by everybody?
And if I can get you to comment, I had some other questions, but I appreciate the way that my colleague, Chairman Weldon, led us into this issue, because I think it addresses a bigger issue that we as Congress have failed to do adequate oversight on these many things, and there is probably a hundred other examples, but these are the ones that come to my mind at this point.
So if you can give me the benefit of your perspective on that, I would appreciate it.
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Mr. MILHOLLIN. Sir, I would say that you are absolutely right. I remember, just after the first Gulf War, pointing out that Iraq had received a tremendous amount of foreign equipment, specifically designed to make nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles from the West, that most of what we were bombing were our own exports in Iraq and that there was no, I repeat, no Congressional oversight of U.S. exports to Iraq before that war.
And since that war, there has been, I would have to say, only spotty oversight. And even today, there is no systematic mechanism in place for Congress to oversee what the Commerce Department actually approves for in the way of dual-use items for nuclear use or missile use or chemical weapon use.
And I don't know whether there is—I happen to know that. I am not sure whether Congress has any oversight mechanism for looking at munitions exports. My suspicion is that it does not.
So I wholeheartedly agree that the Congress and the American Government is certainly not innocent in this matter. But I would like to make a comment about your experience in Libya. I think it is not the same to build—I don't think it is a good thing to build the components for a man-made river project if the activities of the foreign companies violate the embargo.
Obviously, it is important not to violate the embargo. That applies also to the companies that have violated the embargo against Iraq. A lot of Chinese and Russian companies violated the embargo.
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But it is not the same as selling centrifuge components. I mean, making a large concrete pipe in the ground is not same thing as helping someone make a bomb.
Mr. REYES. But, my point was, it is like being a little bit pregnant. You are either very pregnant or you are not pregnant. The point is that we have a history as a Congress, that we don't do either enough or any oversight on these kinds of issues, whether it is building these concrete water delivery systems or whether it is centrifuges or whatever. That was my point.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. That is a very fair point. And I agree with it.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Reyes, I appreciate being able to address that.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Wortzel, I think we have about 60 seconds left, Silvestre, on this vote. If you want to, will you have time to continue when you come back?
Keep on charging, Dr. Wortzel.
Dr. WORTZEL. The Export Administration Act, which would give oversight over the export of dual-use technologies with military and civilian use, hasn't been revised by the United States Congress since 1979.
You can bet technologies have been revised. You really are touching, when you talked about I guess KBR, Kelly, Brown & Root, on the issue of globalization, foreign subsidiaries, how we work, how we deal through them.
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The Export Administration Act was written in 1979 and doesn't even think about embedded military use technologies, dual-use technologies that may be sold by foreign subsidiaries. The European Union is about to consider, on the 25th and 26th, whether to lift its owns arms embargo to China. We are doing defense cooperation on a number of highly advanced defense projects with European countries as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The Arms Export Control Act, which would regulate what defense items and weapons and embedded technologies are sold, has no provisions for really dealing with embedded technologies that may go out through subsidiaries that were developed in cooperative research and development. We are just behind. So I would encourage the Congress to revisit these things.
Dr. CARTER. My response, Congressman—I hope this is helpful—is to make some suggestions about other places where I would like to see more congressional oversight. I mentioned three of them in my testimony. And I will just repeat them again.
The first, particularly pertinent for this committee, is the Department of Defense's counterproliferation programs, which, as I said, are fragmented, poorly funded and not getting the priority they require and just as vital as export controls, one of the tools in the tool box, very vital, also.
The second is in our homeland security effort now, which is several tens of billions of dollars; a considerable fraction of that is new money. And while it is very important to deal with airline security better and all of the other things that are in there, at the end of the day, weapons of mass destruction terrorism is the worst kind of terrorism, and there is really remarkably little in this whole new program that deals specifically with weapons of mass destruction terrorism.
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And the third thing is intelligence. And you said, little things matter. In proliferation, little things matter. Congressman Weldon held up little things that matter a great deal. And the devil of intelligence for weapons of mass destruction is that they come in small packages and can be made by small groups. And they are inherently difficult intelligence targets. And we need to get materially better at weapons of mass destruction intelligence, in general.
I made some suggestions in my written statement about how we can do that because, as I said in my oral statement, the alternative is to live in a missile gap world, like we did in the 1950's where we knew what our problem was, but we didn't know its size and shape.
And we can't stand that, in the 21st Century, to know that weapons of mass destruction are our biggest problem but not know the size and shape of the problem. We have to get better at that.
So those are areas where I think greater involvement by the Congress and the thinking of you here and the action by you, including on this committee, would also make great contributions to counterproliferation.
Mr. REYES. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman. And, Gary, we dissolved the Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) after the demise of the Soviet empire. We really haven't established a successor to deal with this era of terrorists with high technology.
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Indeed, it was kind of interesting, during the old COCOM days, when Toshiba sold the nine access milling machines to the KGB in Japan, we ended up with the President of Toshiba resigning in shame and some sanctions being levied. That was a COCOM penalty, a COCOM-controlled action or a COCOM environment that we lived in.
And yet we would see terrorist countries, countries that were clearly terrorist countries; they weren't under the Warsaw Pact, so they weren't within the jurisdiction, if you will, of COCOM. And now we have dissolved COCOM. We haven't constructed any successor. And you really have, I think, a series of unilateral institutions as well as some multilateral institutions, but unilateral institutions and unilateral actions expected under this new construct of the Wassenaar regime that really doesn't take the place of having a multilateral instrument, like COCOM, with some teeth, perhaps not the sharpest teeth in the world, but with some teeth and the capability to act.
So, I guess my question to you is, do you think we need to have a new successor to COCOM to address this new era, not of Soviet states, but of the terrorist states and individual groups of terrorists?
Mr. MILHOLLIN. I think we do need to invent some kind of a new export control system for the world. The threat that COCOM was aimed at was the threat from the Soviet Union, which included a nuclear threat. That threat was, in its worst form, the possibility that we could destroy the world.
The threat we are facing today is that one or two or three bombs will go off in various places, yet to be determined, made with products that could be controlled for export.
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So the threat is—perhaps you could say the threat is smaller, but it is certainly no different if you are living at Ground Zero from the old threat. So it is only logical that we have some system specifically aimed at this new threat.
And a new kind of COCOM would be a good thing. I think you have to think through, however, how it would work and what the political support for it would be. COCOM was a denial regime. That is, the countries agreed that they were going to deny exports of things on the list. Today, the regimes are approval regimes. That is, we have lists, but the things can be approved as long as they meet certain standards.
We don't have—I think the network shows us we don't have enough countries in the present export control system. That is, whether it is a Nuclear Suppliers Group, whether it is the MTCR, whatever it is, there are too few countries to which these rules apply.
Maybe the way to do this is to, first, come up with the rules you think would suffice, and then, figure out a way to make everybody abide by them.
In my testimony, I have recommended a U.N. resolution. That would have at least some force on every country in the world. But we need to think of a mechanism so that we can reach the kind of fabrication of centrifuge parts that happened in Malaysia, for example, and the kind of retransfers that are going on in Dubai.
We have to get to that activity. And if we just stick with the regimes we have now, as I said before, they only affect what the good guys are doing. They don't get to the problem points in the world. So we do have to basically rethink where we are and come up with a new system.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Gentlemen, any other comments on that.
Dr. WORTZEL. I do agree with you. I think that Wassenaar is nothing but a reporting system. I am not certain that an alliance-based multilateral regime like COCOM is going to be broad enough for what we need, but it is certainly a place to start, with your allies.
The CHAIRMAN. So we need a war on terrorism, counterproliferation regime?
Dr. WORTZEL. And I think you'd get buy-in from a number of countries. And it would be a very useful mechanism.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay.
Dr. Carter.
Dr. CARTER. Only to say that I agree with what you just said, Mr. Chairman, which is a counterproliferation effort that is as vigorous in parallel to our counterterrorism effort—as is our counterterrorism effort—and to repeat something I said earlier, which is that enforcement and intelligence are just as important as the rules.
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I know you said that yourself earlier. I don't believe that the people in Malaysia and Dubai didn't know that they weren't doing the wrong thing. They knew full well that they were doing the wrong thing. And it is not like, if they thought that they were violating the law, they wouldn't have done it.
And so, the issue is whether the government is concerned, have laws on the books and have the incentive to mount the enforcement and intelligence effort required to make sure that those laws are abided by. That is just as important as the law. I am just repeating something you yourself said earlier, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Dr. Snyder. Incidentally, Vic, do we have a couple of more votes coming up?
Dr. SNYDER. I think it is going to be a motion to adjourn and then a speech on each side on the rule and then a 15-minute vote and then a 5-minute vote.
The CHAIRMAN. We will keep wading through it.
Dr. SNYDER. There was a little confusion, Mr. Chairman. I thought we were going to shut down, and then I left. And then I came back and apparently missed 15 minutes or so of this discussion, which I frankly think that members ought to not be put in the position of missing votes or missing a hearing.
I know it is a struggle for you trying to get the schedule done, but, I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing. I think it has been a good discussion with three good people. And I appreciate you setting it up.
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It does point—I think it was Dr. Wortzel that talked about the need for congressional oversight in this kind of program. It is not only an expensive program, and Mr. Weldon's and Mr. Hunter's concerns about waste are always important to everyone, especially taxpayers, but it is also so crucial to our national security. There just has to be—I think, Dr. Carter, you talked about this—has to be elevated within the Administration in importance. Well, we need to have it elevated, I think, attention here, so that we give it the importance that it deserves.
I appreciate, Dr. Carter, your discussion of the Nunn-Lugar program. If I understand what you said here in the written statement, you mentioned you feel like there are too many restrictions, that this program needs—we need to push ahead with it, recognizing that there will be some problems in these kind of complex programs.
But as I heard Mr. Weldon's comments, he was really concentrating on Russia. But in your written statement, you are very clear. You think this thing needs—it is an opportunity to do things in other countries.
We talk about the sites of where there is highly enriched uranium. I keep hearing about a list of 24 sites of highly enriched uranium, but I don't ever get to see the list. But those are in a lot of different places, I think, not just in Russia.
And the—one of the unfortunate things, I think, and I am not sure how it has occurred, but I think some personalities get involved, I think, if you have Senate versus House leadership on this topic of Nunn-Lugar. But I appreciate your comments.
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I think my question—I would like to ask Dr. Carter would be, would you amplify on what you see as ways that we can expand the Nunn-Lugar program in areas beyond Russia?
And if I might make one final comment. Somewhere the statement was made, I think, that the budget for the program is, I think, $50 million less than what it was last year. And the saying was, maybe because the program can't absorb that much money when things are going on. To me, that is like gardening. If I am the gardener, I can't really say that my garden doesn't need water if I don't plant seeds.
As I read your statement, you are saying that there are a whole lot of other opportunities out there to plant seeds that would require a lot more water, which is money, but it would all be in the interest of our national security.
So would you amplify on our one paragraph or one long sentence of other opportunity for expanding Nunn-Lugar outside of Russia?
Dr. CARTER. Yes, I will. And I think your metaphor of seeds is entirely apt. I, too, have been told by my former colleagues in the program, this program or that program holds all of the money it can take right now. And within the framework they are discussing, that can be true. But, the problem is that the framework is much too constraining. It is, first of all, Russia only. And that is the main point you wanted me to address myself to.
And second, within Russia, within a program that has become not success-oriented, not getting-the-job-done oriented, but a level of effort—I was present the very first year that Nunn-Lugar was appropriated. And incredibly, it was about $400 million.
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And now, all of these years later you say, how big is the Nunn-Lugar program in DOD? It is $400 million. Now, is there some law of nature or magic that keeps it at that level? No. It is a level-of-effort program rather than an accomplish-the-job program. And I think we need more of the accomplish-the-job mindset and less of the level-of-effort mindset, which gives you the answers that you elicited from the bureaucracy.
On your larger point, which is terribly important, what can we do outside of Russia? Let me give some examples. I hope that the Nunn-Lugar methodology and, as far as I am concerned, the Nunn-Lugar funding are applied to Libya, to the entire rooting out of everything that they have and making sure that no residue of it persists in Libya or gets outside of Libya somewhere else.
I would like to see the Nunn-Lugar methodology applied to the safeguarding of what Pakistan has because, as I said, the Talibanization of Pakistan is a nightmare scenario.
I would like to see the Nunn-Lugar methodology on offer to North Korea. If they are willing to go the path of Libya—or Ukraine or you pick your model—and forswear weapons of mass destruction, then it seems to me it is in our interest to get in there and get it all and dismantle it with our own hands.
I would like to see us do the same thing in Iran if and when we are able to accomplish the same objective with Iran.
You mentioned, absolutely rightly, the presence of highly enriched uranium scattered around the world. This goes back to research reactor programs of the past. Each one of those is a sleeper cell of nuclear terrorism and should be rooted out as they were, for example, in Vinca, Serbia, a few years ago. And then there are also the other non-Russian former Soviet states where there is still work to do.
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So there is a whole world out there. And I would like to see the individual, that the Chairman and I were discussing earlier, in the Administration, a high-level person, charged with the imaginative management of this program the way that Bremer is charged with the imaginative management of postwar Iraq. I would like to see that person put this whole program out there, say this is what we will do, this is our objective, this is our vision how to get this entire job done worldwide, I have designed the programs to accomplish that.
Some of them will await, yes, the diplomatic success, which we hope that we have with North Korea, with Iran and so forth. The model, the diplomatic success of Libya. But that is the larger vision for Nunn-Lugar. And the system, the program now is in this protective crouch. And it is not getting the job done.
Dr. WORTZEL. I think that, perhaps, one of the greatest potential threats running around out there is what Dr. Carter referred to as the Talibanization of Pakistan. That, the potential for that and President Musharaff's—there have been two recent attempts to assassinate him—lost control there, puts that entire nuclear capability really at risk in the hands of we don't know who.
So the idea of safeguards, I think, is an important one. I think the idea of working there—I would prefer to see them get rid of their weapons. But the ability of the eyes-on there would probably, perhaps, preclude what may have to be preemptive action in that case just to prevent a disaster. I think it is very important.
With respect to North Korea, they are quite aware of what could be on the table with Nunn-Lugar programs. They had—I was down at the Nunn Center at Georgia Tech with Li Gun and some other people, I think, three years ago, where people discussed this in sort of an academic setting. So they are aware of it.
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I said in my testimony, they have some serious decisions to make. I think they know that there is will certainly in Europe, in the United States and in Australia, if we are not playing guessing games about what weapons programs they still may have, to help them out. So I appreciate the idea, and I thank you for it.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. I would say that, perhaps, we ought might be cautious about the portability of the Nunn-Lugar idea. The Nunn-Lugar program is being implemented in a country that has nuclear weapons and a lot of them, the means to deliver them, has an expensive infrastructure for maintaining them and is not about to give them up. For the United States to fund activities in such a place designed to reduce the risk of proliferation from such a state is really an extraordinary thing.
If you start thinking about transporting that elsewhere, you immediately run into the problem that the countries we are talking about, Iran, North Korea, Libya, wouldn't get that kind of support unless they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons.
So we are looking at really a different problem. We are looking at the challenge of making sure that when they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons, they really did so. And we are looking at the problem of rewarding them in some way for that. We are not looking at the problem of making an existing arsenal, which is going to continue to exist, more safe from proliferation.
So I would just suggest to you that there is a limit in the ability to transport the model to other places. It remains true that there are lots of locations in the world that have material that could be used to make nuclear weapons. And those all need to be better protected. They need to be reduced in number; that is, the material needs to be moved out of them. And it is in our interest to pay for that.
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Whether you want to call it Nunn-Lugar or whether you want to call it something else is really not that important. But the job needs to be done, and it is a very important job.
Dr. CARTER. Congressman, if I may just touch on that, because I don't want to let stand something that I don't agree with. And I am not exactly sure what Mr. Milhollin means. But Kazakhstan and Ukraine and Belarus were recipients of Nunn-Lugar assistance in becoming non-nuclear States.
So he is saying—I don't know exactly what he means by that—but, that Russia—that Nunn-Lugar has been applied to a state that retains nuclear weapons. That is not accurate. It has been applied to Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, which were countries in the process entirely of denuclearizing. So that is not a reason to change the model. There may be other reasons to change the model; that is not one.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. If I can just respond. I would say that it is perfectly legitimate and useful to have Nunn-Lugar funds used to achieve the status of a non-nuclear weapons state, that is, not having nuclear weapons.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. And if that could help somewhere else in achieving that goal, that would be fine with me. So I don't want to be misinterpreted here.
Mr. WELDON [presiding.] Mr. Gibbons is recognized for five minutes.
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Mr. GIBBONS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen to each of you. Thank you for taking time today to help illuminate us on these very issues that are so important. And our discussion today is combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We talked a lot about the policies and talked a lot about Nunn-Lugar. And I want to drum down a little bit one of the most important tools that we have in combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which is intelligence. And you know, we all know that intelligence is an art, not a science. But what we have today in today's political atmosphere is a politization of the intelligence community, the active intelligence. And to the degree that what we have before us is always being second guessed. As I said, intelligence is an art, not a science.
Let me bring you a point in fact. In today's political world, we consider the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate as basis for a lot of criticism of our intelligence community, and it is based primarily on six little words. ''Iraq has chemical and biological weapons'' listed in their first paragraph. However, that is only the first six words. And if you read all of the paragraph in total, you would understand that politics has played a big role in demonizing the national intelligence effort.
And let me finish out by saying what the other six words are, and then I will get to three very important issues that I want you to address very quickly. The other words that follow on those very important six words, Iraq has chemical and biologic weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions. If left uncheck, Iraq probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
Now it goes on also to say that we judge—that we are only seeing a portion of Iraq's WMD efforts owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts. Now I am concerned and I would like to get your opinion about criticism about our intelligence efforts and the intelligence community as a whole, which is doing more than simply polarizing collection agency versus collection agency and polarizing intelligence individuals, analysts versus operations in there. It is leading to an atmosphere in my view, and I would like to get your opinion, whether it is leading to an atmosphere of risk aversion where analysts are not going to be able to completely and fully, without hesitation, give an estimate of what they believe those few dots that we are able to collect represent. It is not a question of connecting dots, as I hear time and time again.
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Intelligence is the art of collecting dots. And the fewer dots you have, the more difficult the picture is to draw. So risk aversion in our intelligence community I would like your assessment on.
I also want your assessment, in your candid answer, to the need of a preemptive attack policy for the United States. And if you could elaborate on the need for a preemptive attack policy to ensure security.
Finally, one change that no one wants to talk about, but I think it is important, is changing the international institutional belief that innocent nations have the burden of proof to require, or to prove that a nation has weapons of mass destruction versus changing that burden of proof to ensuring that the Nation that is being alleged has the burden of proof to show that it has no weapons of mass destruction. Those three questions, gentlemen, if each of you could take a brief moment and answer it, I would be grateful.
Dr. CARTER. Congressman, may I volunteer to go first for the following reason, and then Mr. Chairman, if I could beg your permission. The airlines being what they are, I need to excuse myself. I need to excuse myself shortly after this answer. Three very good questions, and I hesitate to answer, because I believe you are a member of the Intelligence Committee, so you are more familiar with many of these matters than I am, but let me take your first and third together, and answer your first and third by saying something I said in my written statement here, which is that we need more dots in the weapons of mass destruction area. And yes, it has to be the case that people have the freedom to fill in what we don't know as best they can in an intellectually honest and rigorous way.
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But if what we don't know is so large in comparison to what we do know, no amount of good interpretation is going to lead to a good result. I made some suggestions about how to improve intelligence in the area of weapons of mass destruction, and let me just say what they are.
The first is some avenues of technology, which happens to be my field, which are particularly fruitful, some classified, but some that can be referred to and which I have referred to. The second is precisely what you said. We need greater—it is a policy issue, not a technology issue. We need to shift the burden from those who would say you are up to something bad to those who might be up to something bad to show they are clean.
Related to that is greater requirements for international transparency around the world. I also am concerned about the technical depth of the intelligence community in these areas. This is basically technical intelligence and I think we need to worry about the technical qualifications of the workforce and their links to the larger outside scientific and technological effort.
And finally, a point I make in here, which I think is also terribly important is to follow the lead of counterterrorism. We have made counterterrorism intelligence more actionable in the last few years and that has led to a better product. People working in intelligence problems do it better. Their motivation is better and the quality of the product is better. I saw this again and again in military operations. If they feel that they are just not making papers and filling out stop light charts about who is doing bad things, but that their assessments are harnessed to action, and as we get a kind of proliferation program that is more action-oriented, like our counterterrorism program has become, I think, the quality of the intelligence will improve.
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Finally, on the matter, Congressman, of the preemption policy. As I said in my statement, I think preemption is a necessary tool. And if you get there, you have to use it, because we can't tolerate being attacked first by weapons of mass destruction. And so, the best defense has to be a good offense. To me that is not a doctrine in the sense that it is your first resort or that it applies to many places. To me, it is an option, but it is an option you have to recognize you might need to resort to in the particular matter of weapons of mass destruction, where you can't tolerate being attacked first.
So it came as my last of my eight Ds in my strategy, and it is the last one you get to. But anybody who says that we can sit back when weapons of mass destruction threats are imminent and wait, or even in a situation of uncertainty wait, I think is imprudent. Not a doctrine, not a policy, an option, but for sure an option.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Dr. Carter. We appreciate you being with us and I know you have to leave. We are going to proceed to have our witnesses answer Mr. Gibbons' questions. Mr. Bartlett has not yet asked questions, so we will let him ask and then we have to vacate the room because there is another hearing coming in. So we will be out of here within ten minutes so we can go vote, a series of two votes and we apologize for this problem, but we will submit other questions for the record. If you would answer them for us, I would appreciate it. Either one you can respond. And then following your answers, Mr. Bartlett, any questions you have.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Gibbons, you asked a question near and dear to my heart. I spent 25 years as an Army intelligence officer. I have done signals intelligence collection, a lot of years in human intelligence collection and a few years of counterintelligence, so I have been out there in that community. We used to kid around in the field that policy is made in spite of intelligence. It ought to probably be made informed by intelligence. I think the national intelligence estimates system, as it has been revised, is not a bad one. I mean, it is still community opinion of the lowest common denominator, but there is room in there for real dissenting opinion by specific agencies and there is outside review. And when you see those estimates, you know that very often, you will see dissenting outside review.
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So I think you get a reasonably fair hearing of what is available. I think there is some ability within the different agencies for people with impunity, without fear of being punished, to come out with dissenting opinions and raise them and have them registered. The ombudsman system out at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one way of doing that. But it is a bureaucracy. And if you are always the burr under the saddle as a career bureaucrat, at some point your managers are going to say, there is a great job in Alaska. One of the finest budget analysts I have ever seen on the Chinese military budget was a total naysayer and got sent off; you know, go to Harvard for a year.
When you are done there, go to that fellowship. So that happens. And that is what I think begins to cause really good policy analysts to say, okay, am I going to stay at GS–11 or am I going to move ahead to a GS–12. Now, I think that the intelligence system hasn't been great. I mean, they couldn't—we couldn't as a nation predict the timing of the Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests. And we don't know how many there were. We didn't know exactly where they were going to be.
That is pretty bad. It is kind of inexcusable. I think we were surprised by how far ahead Libya was and that is a problem we watched for a very long time. I think that from the standpoint of congressional oversight on the committees, I think the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (PATRIOT) Act was a very good thing in removing some of the restrictions on intelligence action and operations when it concerns domestic security. And there is a decent balance that was put in there on ensuring civil liberties are protected. That has not been done—that has not been done for foreign intelligence collection. So many of the restrictions that were put on the intelligence community and on the ability to operate—by the Church Commission, hadn't been lifted for foreign intelligence, not in the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) directives or legislation.
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That is something to look at. If I were king for a day, the Director of Central Intelligence would not be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. We would have a National Director of Central Intelligence who would have the opportunity to make judgments about collection objectives, about management in the community and the apportionment of funds within the community.
And it would be a DCI that rewards success and penalizes failure. And the institutionalized bureaucracy and the need to worry about the rice bowl and the people you work with everyday, I think somehow limits what the CIA director, who is also the DCI, may be willing to do. So that is a change I would make.
And finally, I think the management culture in the system has to reward a certain amount of risk taking, whether it is in conducting unilateral operations or in certain types of clandestine activity.
Now with respect to preemption, I think the operative words are imminent threat, certain knowledge, and then you can begin to act and should act. And the other principle that I would suggest in a policy that includes preemption as an option is that covert unilateral action, if you are not getting cooperation from a third country, particularly a third country that is a base for terrorists, has to be a potential option.
Mr. MILHOLLIN. I think these three questions are good questions, but they are difficult to answer. I will take the last one first. Should we change the burden of proof on countries to prove that they are not harboring weapons of mass destruction? I think in a world—it might be a good idea theoretically, but in a world we live in, I think it is probably not going to happen. If someone alleges a country has weapons of mass destruction and the country takes the official position that it doesn't, then the burden of proof is going to be on whomever says that it does have to prove that. I think it would be very difficult to have a system that operates the other way, maybe because my bias is as a lawyer.
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If the question is, if a farmer went to town, the person who usually has the burden of proof is—if the farmer says, I never went to town, how does the farmer prove that? The person normally who has the burden of proof is the person who alleges that the farmer did go to town. You have a problem with the burden of proof there.
Second, your second question is, when do we need a preemptive attack policy? I think the principal emphasis ought to be on the word policy. I am not sure that such a policy helps, because if the United States is going to go to war with somebody, that decision is going to be driven by the events of the moment inevitably. So having a policy in advance that says you are going to do it, or you are not going to do it, I think is just going to be subject to whatever the circumstances really are and how imminent you think the threat is at the time.
So having such a policy, I am not sure what it would get you. North Korea certainly could be seen as an imminent threat. It is making warhead material. It has announced it is going to sell the material, or could. Iran may get nuclear weapons capability in a year or so, but I don't hear anybody saying we are going to go to war with those countries any time soon. Maybe that is wrong. Maybe they will change their mind. But if we do, it seems it will be driven by events on the ground, something that happens. So having a policy in advance, again, I am not sure it tells what you what we are going to do.
Your first question is, are we demonizing intelligence services by criticizing them. I guess I agree with Mr. Wortzel, that they haven't been doing a very good job or at least producing what we need. Our intelligence services missed the Iraqi nuclear program before the first Gulf War. We didn't know about the calutrons, which were the most important part of the program. After the war, we seemed to have misapprehended the existence of actual weapon agent in Iraq. So a critic of our intelligence system says we missed it twice in Iraq; it is true we didn't know about, didn't anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998.
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We just need to do better. I am not saying it is not an easy target. Proliferation is difficult. It is not an easy thing to ferret out. For our policies to be successful, we have to do a better job. And I think that the intelligence agencies are just going to inevitably get criticized if they don't produce better results. And it may be that the result will be that risk aversion is created or not, but I don't think we are going to be in a position so we can avoid making criticism. I just don't think that is going to happen. I think they are going to continue to be criticized.
Mr. WELDON. Gentlemen, I want to thank you both, and I apologize for this abrupt ending. As we go to vote, we have two minutes left. But we appreciate the excellent work you are doing. I particularly read all the material you put out and it helps me, as a member of this committee, understand what is going on. Your work is very valuable, we appreciate that and thank you for not just for being here, but more importantly, for the ongoing work you do for the country and for the proliferation—better understanding of proliferation around the world. And any follow-up questions, we will give you for the record. This hearing now stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:15 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]