How the GOP learned to love the bomb.

The scene is Prague, whose beautiful churches and bridges were, almost miraculously, spared the ravages of two world wars. It is just before Christmas, and people are laughing and chatting on the streets as they do their last-minute shopping. Jaroslav Wagner, a retired nuclear scientist, starts the engine of his luxe blue Saab--conspicuous on this block of cheap Skodas--to make his delivery. He pulls out and speeds away. In his trunk is a metal canister, and in the canister are six pounds of highly enriched uranium, which is enough, in the hands of the right terrorists, to build a primitive nuclear weapon. Enough, that is, to ravage a city. Metty Christmas, Prague.

Sound like the latest from lan Fleming or John Le Carre? Try the newspaper. Wagner was apprehended last December.

Unfortunately, the Wagner case is not as unusual as you might think. The demise of the Soviet Union, and the rather abrupt end of the Cold War nuclear arms race, has left the East's sprawling nuclear infrastructure in chaos. Nuclear weapons of all kinds--and the enriched uranium and plutonium used to make them--are scattered about Russia and the newly independent states, and Russia is too broke and out of control to keep tabs on them. This, declares Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, is "the number one threat to American national security today."

Welcome to the fin de siecle, where nuclear overindulgence has, indeed, made us vulnerable --and where Republicans in our own Congress are about to make a bad situation worse.

In 1991, Senators Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, joined forces to deal with the Cold War's dangerous legacy. The "Nunn-Lugar" program, which began the next year, was designed to help dismantle nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S., and to help safeguard and account for leftover nuclear materials. So far in the former Soviet Union, with this American help, more than 2,800 nuclear warheads have been deactivated, 630 strategic launchers and bombers have been eliminated, and over 1,000 strategic Russian warheads that could be aimed at the U.S. are no longer deployed. Using

Amanda Bichsel is a Russia analyst for a foreign policy and defense consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Nunn-Lugar assistance, Russia will also fulfill its obligations under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) two years ahead of schedule, paving the way for further reductions. And do you remember when Ukraine refused to give up its nuclear weapons? Nunn-Lugar was critical in convincing Ukraine's leaders (as well as those of Kazakhstan and Belarus) to hand their weapons over to the Russians and promise not to build their own. All this for less then $400 million per year, less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the total defense budget.

But House Republicans, who plan to increase Pentagon spending by something approaching $10 billion this fiscal year, want to kill Nunn-Lugar. In February, $20 million was cut back from the program and the latest spending bill threatens to freeze all of its funding. While useless weapons systems are kept in production, this country is abandoning a crucial strategy for defending itself in the new world disorder: The threat today is less that Russia will invade Germany, but that the next Jaroslav Wagner might not be stopped--and that Prague '94 could just as easily be New York City '96.

Cleaning Up the Mess

The Cold War threw the two superpowers headlong into an arms race that would last almost 50 years, cost over $4 trillion in the U.S. alone, and leave both Russia and the U.S. with enormous nuclear weapons stockpiles. At last count, Russia had 25,000 weapons, while the U.S. weighed in at 14,000.

The problem now is what to do with them. Russia and the U.S. are dismantling their weapons at the rate of about 2,000 a year. But after the delivery system--the missile, or bomb, or whatever--has been demolished, the radioactive core of the weapon is still there. This highly enriched uranium or plutonium (known as "fissile material") cannot be easily destroyed. But it also can't be abandoned. The most difficult part of building a nuclear weapon, you see, is not putting the components together, but producing this fissile material, the bomb's crucial ingredient. It's a terrorist's dream to find this stuff ready-made--and all that is needed is a few pounds.

Meanwhile, Russia is sitting on at least 170 tons of plutonium and 1,200 tons of highly enriched uranium. The Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) has no idea how much fissile material was produced or is currently held in the former Soviet Union today. In February, one production center of weapons-grade plutonium reported that several hundred kilograms of plutonium were "lost."

This stuff could destroy the world many times over. But too much of it--of the material that can be located, anyway--is guarded less vigilantly than the average convenience store. Once weapons are dismantled, their parts are taken by rail through 11 time zones with hundreds of stops. If and when the material does reach its intended destination, it is stored in facilities that would make your junior high locker room look like maximum security lock-up--guarded by demoralized soldiers, or research scientists who have families to feed. Even though Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine have given up their nuclear weapons, stores of plutonium and uranium are still being discovered.

In the last three years, there have been at least five serious cases of diversion of weapons-usable plutonium and uranium--all widely reported in the press. The details are spine-chilling. In May 1993, 33 crates containing highly enriched uranium mixed with a metal substance were discovered in a bank vault in Vilnius, Lithuania. Apparently, the material was intercepted by a company called AMI (basically, a front company for two mafia middlemen) in the Russian region of Sverdlovsk as it was being shipped from a physics institute in Obninsk. From there it was transported to an organized crime group in Lithuania. Its final destination: the Middle East.

The amount of uranium in this bust wasn't enough to construct a bomb. But there's no reason to think that the same underground railroad couldn't be used for larger packages. Remember, it only takes a few pounds of the stuff. And the cast of characters in the Vilnius case should make you worry: It included at least one senior regional Russian government official, a senior official at a notoriously unsafe nuclear storage facility, an organization with apparent links to the KGB and mafia groups, and, very likely, an arms merchant tied to Middle East states and terrorist organizations.

It's not hard to figure out why Russia needs help locking up and keeping tabs on this dangerous material. In its transition to a market economy, the government finds itself unable to pay its salaries or fund law enforcement. In 1993, for example, four kilograms of enriched uranium were stolen from a naval shipyard near Murmansk. Second class captain Alexei Tikhomirov, driven by despair and poverty, managed to break through the wooden fence, saw off the padlock on the warehouse door, lift the lid of a container, and break off three pieces of a nuclear reactor core. Mikhail Kulik, the chief Russian investigator of the theft, wasn't surprised. He recounted this tale in an interview with Russia's monthly Yaderny Kontrol. "Potatoes," he commented, "are better guarded."

Put simply, Russia needs our help--and with our own national security at stake, we need Russia to accept it. Under funds provided by Nunn-Lugar, the Pentagon has worked closely with the Russian Ministry of Defense to help ensure that nuclear materials get where they are going safely--and then stay there. Nunn-Lugar pays for secure rail cars, weapons supercontainers, and armored blankets to safely transport fissile materials. The program is also contributing to a secure storage facility, special theft-proof fissile material canisters to put inside, and emergency response equipment for unforeseen disasters along the way.

For a vivid example of the benefits of Nunn-Lugar, consider the case of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow. When a Department of Energy official visited the site, he found 160 pounds of weapons-grade uranium stored in high-school style lockers and secured by a tiny chain looped through the handles. Kurchatov, with its crumbling walls and lack of inventory control system, posed the greatest risk of nuclear theft in the former Soviet Union.

With Nunn-Lugar funds, the Russians, using American technology, built a new fence around Kurchatov's Building 116, which houses two test reactors and 75 kilos of fissile material. The fence is now armed with microwave sensors, alarms, and cameras; at the opening is a nuclear materials detector. And in April, a six-month experimental program was launched at Kurchatov: Remote sensors and video cameras were installed in storage vaults containing highly enriched uranium, and similar equipment was placed in the Argonne-West lab in Idaho. Both nations are now able to monitor each other's nuclear sites. Similar security improvements at Russian research labs, institutes, and plants have been helped with $20 million in Nunn-Lugar funds. Would we prefer to pay--perhaps in lives--for the consequences of not securing these places?

Nunn-Lugar has also provided a comprehensive demilitarization strategy for the former Soviet Union, sending bulldozers, cranes, electric drills, saws, cable shredders, plasma cutters, and giant shears to hack apart weapons, missile silos and launch pads. American Nunn-Lugar funds are also being used to destroy Russia's chemical weapons stockpiles (estimated at between 40,000 and 200,000 tons), by assisting with the design and construction of a chemical weapons destruction facility in Shchuchie, Russia.

Sometimes the work is even more dramatic. Last November, Americans led "Project Sapkphire," a top-secret operation in Kazakhstan that retrieved 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium--enough to make several dozen nuclear weapons--and moved it to the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee, where black marketeers, terrorists and rogue states like Iran can't touch it. According to Secretary of Defense William Perry, "without our cooperation with Kazakhstan on Nunn-Lugar, we might never have known about the existence of this material."

Nunn-Lugar funding also helps ease the dismantling of the giant Russian military-industrial complex--granting seed money, for example, to U.S. companies that help convert weapons industries in Russia to consumer manufacturing, making dental equipment, hearing aids, and cola bottling equipment. Because it is illegal in these countries to decommission a military officer unless he is provided housing, Nunn-Lugar has also helped to convert a Soviet missile factory into one that produces materials for apartment complexes.

Time Bomb

Senators Nunn and Lugar were visionaries. When they first developed their plan in 1991, the new threats of the former Soviet Union were only just beginning to appear. Now the picture is much clearer. The only thing stopping, say, North Korea or Iraq from building bombs is the difficulty of obtaining fissile material, and recent reports show Iraq much further along in its program than had been thought.

More should be done, not less, to ensure that Russia does not open shop (either intentionally or by neglect) for the materials to complete these projects. It is also becoming clear that the nuclear threat now is not just from the Saddaam Husseins of the world, but from the Timothy McVeighs and Aum Shinrikyos.

In such a dangerous world, the Republicans are showing remarkable narrow-mindedness in cutting Nunn-Lugar. To justify this move, they are linking Nunn-Lugar to Russian behavior on other fronts. The General Accounting Office, for example, has suggested that some scientists at Moscow's International Science and Technology Center (funded in part by the U.S.) are still working at their old jobs in biological weapons research. But the fact remains that every scientist employed by the Center is one more we can keep track of, and one less recruit for the world's nuclear wannabes. And the wannabes don't foot around: By last fall, Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan, among others, had set up trade offices in Moscow to solicit Russian research laboratories to work on their nuclear programs.

To be sure, Republicans ought to move toward enforcing the international ban on biological weapons. But where is the logic in "punishing" Russia by slowing its nuclear disarmament?

The Republicans also take issue with the "nondefense" activities of Nunn-Lugar--presumably anything outside the realm of weapon-smashing. But the Russian government is faced with the choice of paying our captain Alexei's salary (often months late) or beefing up the shipyard security system. A tough choice for a country with a fragile social compact. Helping with conversion and housing goes a long way towards girding this compact. For if it falls apart, we're in real trouble. "If we focus just on destroying weapons and ignore the people and facilities," Secretary Perry has said, "the Soviet nuclear Hydra could turn around and grow new warheads."

In 1995, then, the imperative for Nunn-Lugar funding is stronger, not weaker, than it was four years ago. But when Representative Bob Dornan moved to freeze Nunn-Lugar funding, the House approved the motion 244 to 180. Dornan, raving about tax dollars being spent in what remains of the "Evil Empire," seems lost in this new and complex world. He and his ilk fail to understand that $400 million to help remove the twentieth century's biggest threat is a paltry sum, indeed, especially considering the $4 trillion the U.S. spent perfecting it.

Meanwhile, Republicans want to spend half a billion dollars for a B-2 Stealth bomber that the Pentagon doesn't want and $1.4 billion for a third Seawolf nuclear submarine that defense analysts say the country does not need. They are even pushing to continue the $35 billion "Star Wars" missile defense program. Even if Star Wars did work--which is unlikely--it would not stop terrorists from smuggling a nuclear weapon into New York harbor. It is the suitcase from Almaty or Tehran, not the ICBM launched from China or Russia, that should worry us most.

So consider another scene: Your breakfast table, in the not-too-distant future. You are reading the morning paper over your cereal. The lead story: Some lunatic has stolen a cola can-sized amount plutonium--more than enough to make a massively destructive nuclear weapon--from a Russian nuclear storage facility and is now running around Libya, screaming holy war at the United States. For now, it's the stuff of Fleming and Le Carre.

Let's keep it that way.

RELATED ARTICLE: Who's Who

The New Republic's Matthew Cooper, an alumnus of this magazine, was the first White House correspondent, while he was still with U.S. News and World Report, to perceive the rising influence of political guru Dick Morris. Cooper's latest bulletin is that Morris is behind a new Bill Clinton policy called triangulation in which the President equidistances himself from both Democrats and Republicans. Cooper adds: "Call it flattery--or sucking up--but White House aides now unselfconsciously mimic Morris' habit of explaining triangulation with his hands."...

The competition must have been keen, we thought, when we heard Knight-Ridder was choosing the worst congressman. It turned out that the choice was so difficult that the best they could do was name a "serious contender" for the honor. She is Representative Barbara-Rose Collins of Detroit. She has the third worst attendance record, behind only one member who had a liver transplant and another who was on trial for statutory rape. She originated just one law in five years on the Hill--to rename the courthouse in Detroit. At least 20 of her aides have departed since last year, including a press secretary she fired because she thought he had AIDS. According to The Hill, she used one staffer as her personal maid "to regularly clean [her] home."...

As a young man, National Security Advisor Tony Lake displayed a gift for candor with his draft board that rivals that of his boss, Bill Clinton. According to Jason DeParle of The New York Times, Lake told his board that he would like to be deferred because he was learning Vietnamese for a State Department job. A somewhat skeptical board member asked him to count to 10 in Vietnamese. Lake didn't want to reveal that his language training had not started, so he counted to 10 in Chinese, an Asian language he did know, and got the deferment. In contrast to his boss, however, Lake did go to Vietnam, even though it was as a civilian....

Sometimes the effort to live a life that is beyond reproach requires an ability to make subtle distinctions. Take Newt Gingrich who, according to a former female friend quoted by Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair, liked oral sex "because then he can say, `I never slept with her.'"...

Bill and Hillary Clinton's defense fund has paid out $491,134 in legal fees and still owes $918,987 to Williams & Connolly, and $680,311 to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom. One wonders what the fee would be if they had actually been indicted for a crime?...

If you want to know why you don't hear Paul Begala's name mentioned anymore as one of Bill Clinton's political advisors, it may have something to do with the fact that he called White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta "the poster boy for economic constipation."...

Stanley Meisler, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times has written an illuminating new book, United Nations: The First 50 Years. You may not believe that I take books about the U.N. to bed at night, but this one is actually a lively read. Meisler seems to have the right take on Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, explaining Boutros-Ghali's loner-tendencies--"There is a joke that whenever the Secretary General wants to look for someone he can trust, he stands up on his two feet, walks across the room to the wall, and looks into the mirror"--by tracing his background as a Coptic Christian trying to survive in Moslem Egypt. Meisler's understanding of Boutros-Ghali may have something to do with the fact that both are fluent in French, and that Boutros-Ghali is not at all comfortable in English, which is the only language most of the other American U.N. correspondents are familiar with....

Who will replace departing White House Deputy Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles? Possible successors: Deputy Press Secretary Evelyn Lieberman, or a dark horse candidate, FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

Viewers of ABC's "World News Tonight" may be wondering why Richard Holbrooke has not been named the "Person of the Week," an award doled out each Friday by anchor Peter Jennings. Could it be because Holbrooke is now married to Kati Marton, Jennings's ex-wife? We suspect that Micheal Eisner and the other big boys at Disney/Capital Cities would not want the award handed off with the phrase "and so we choose ...the man who is sleeping former Mrs." ...

Governor Mike Lowry of Washington has agreed to pay $975,000 in an out of court settlement of sexual harassment charges leveled by his former spokesperson, Susanne Albright, who accused him of persistent groping and lewd remarks. In an article she wrote for The Washington Post, Albright recently described her reaction to the experience, in words that might well be pondered by you bosses out there who just don't get why subordinates are not always flattered by sexual advances: "I began to question everything about myself. Did I get the job because I was qualified? Was I worthy of the position? Or was I hired simply because the governor liked to touch me and look at me?"...

Ever wonder what a "wedge issue" is? The definitive explanation has been provided by Governor Pete Wilson of California (thanks to The Washington Times for the quote): "Wedge issues are issues that people want to ignore that are real problems. Typically they're liberals, but in this case they're Republicans who may have picked up, for reasons that relate to their own interests, on a charge made by liberals who don't want to recognize a real problem, who want to ignore it. That's what a wedge issue is." Well, that certainly clears things up....