White House Claims of Increased Nonproliferation Spending Are Misleading, Critics Say

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has not increased funding for securing and eliminating WMD materials overseas — despite claims that it has increased nonproliferation funding — and in some cases it has sought to cut back such programs, proliferation experts said this week.

During the presidential debate last week, President George W. Bush said that funding for nonproliferation programs has increased by 35 percent since he took office (see GSN, Oct. 1). The White House subsequently released a table with data supporting that assertion. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration in June released a fact sheet stating that Energy nonproliferation spending had increased “dramatically” during the administration.

The Bush administration’s claims, however, lump together money for overseas threat-reduction funding — to secure and destroy weapons of mass destruction and related materials overseas — with money to eliminate U.S. fissile materials and to research nonproliferation technologies, said Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“Basically, what they’re doing is they’re including all of the defense nuclear nonproliferation account at the Department of Energy,” said Bunn.

Money requested by the administration for threat reduction, he said, has remained fairly flat compared to what President Bill Clinton sought for fiscal 2001.

Funding data provided by the administration, he said, shows “that roughly three-quarters of the gross [increase] in spending during the Bush terms is for the disposition of U.S. plutonium and that the vast majority of threat-reduction programs don’t get any gross [increase] at all and some actually have small declines.”

The administration, in fact, requested for fiscal 2005 a decrease in funding for the three major threat-reduction programs, at the State, Defense, and Energy departments, compared to fiscal 2004. 

Records show requested budgets for Energy programs decreasing from $459 million   to   $439 million, Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction programs down from $451 million to $409 million, and State Department efforts down from $81 million to $71 million.

The government’s budget data shows that overall nonproliferation funding has, as Bush said, increased from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005 by about 35 percent from $1.49 billion to $2.01 billion.

An analysis of the data by Bunn and his colleagues, however, suggests that about three-quarters of the increase was for disposing of U.S. plutonium and highly enriched uranium through the Energy Department program.

Disposal of U.S. weapon-grade fissile materials “is an important thing,” Bunn said, “but it’s not securing nuclear material anywhere else in the world where terrorists are likely to get at it.”

“If they don’t think reducing large stockpiles of plutonium isn’t reducing a threat, then they’re in the wrong business,” said Bryan Wilkes, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Wilkes said the plutonium disposition program results from an agreement with Russia that requires the elimination of 34 metric tons of each nation’s weapon-grade plutonium.

Bunn noted that federal budget data shows funding for the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program was about the same in fiscal 2001 as in fiscal 2005, roughly $410 million. The administration tried to cut money from the program for fiscal 2002, but Congress returned the funding after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bunn said.

The State Department’s overall nonproliferation budget has decreased slightly since fiscal 2001, from $261 million to $251 million this year, according to the data.

For the three departments taken together, the administration’s threat-reduction budget of $1.07 billion for fiscal 2005 is about the same as Clinton’s fiscal 2001 budget of $1.09 billion, adjusted for inflation, said Bunn’s Belfer Center colleague Anthony Wier.

That is “almost exactly the same as the Clinton budget request for FY 2001, made before the 9/11 attacks occurred,” he said.

During the debate, challenger Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) accused Bush of reduced efforts to secure foreign nuclear materials, apparently citing statistics published by Bunn and Wier in a May report, Securing the Bomb: An Agenda For Action.

“There are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today. And this president, I regret to say, has secured less nuclear material in the last two years since 9/11 than we did in the two years preceding 9/11,” he said.

Kerry has said he would significantly increase threat-reduction spending if elected president.

Kerry also charged that “there are some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing that, it will take 13 years to get it,” he said.

Bunn said Kerry was incorrect on that latter charge.   According to an analysis in Securing the Bomb, about 22 percent of the 600 or so tons of nuclear material was comprehensively secured by the end of fiscal 2003.

“The amount that’s unsecured is certainly less” than 600 tons, Bunn said.

Bunn said Kerry was correct that it could take 13 years to fully secure all of that material at the current rate of progress, a conclusion that was drawn in Securing the Bomb.

Kerry also was wrong, Bunn said, in saying the administration was spending hundreds off millions of dollars on a new earth-penetrating nuclear weapon capability. The administration is seeking $27.6 million for fiscal 2005 and has projected a budget of $485 million for the next five years (see GSN, March 10).

In June, following the release of Securing the Bomb, the Energy Department issued a fact sheet headlined, “Nonproliferation Spending and Activities Up Dramatically in this Administration,” that appeared to challenge the report’s conclusions.

It said that President Bush’s most recent Energy Department budget request to Congress “sought a nonproliferation budget of $1.35 billion — a nearly 75-percent increase over the last and largest budget request of the previous administration.”

“No responsibility of a president is more important than national security and no element of national security policy is more important than nuclear policy,” it said, quoting a June statement by Linton Brooks, administrator of the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

In July, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham published a commentary in the Washington Post in which he wrote that by the end of fiscal 2004 Energy will have secured 46 percent of the 600 tons of Russian and Soviet nuclear material. It also said that more such material was secured in fiscal years 2003 and 2004 than in any previous two years, and that the administration plans to finish security upgrades of all potentially vulnerable material by the end of 2008.

“With all these initiatives and other efforts across the government, President Bush is pursuing the most aggressive nonproliferation effort in history,” Abraham wrote.

Bunn charged the administration is “changing the counting rules to create the impression of greater progress than has yet occurred.”

Abraham was able to claim 46 percent would be secured by the end of this fiscal year, Bunn said, by including partial security upgrades in the total along with comprehensive improvements.

The partial upgrades include storage sites with only the first, “rapid-upgrade” steps completed, such as “bricking over windows [and] putting detectors at the doors,” he said.

Bunn said the 46 percent actually represents “very slow” progress, as Securing the Bomb found that 43 percent of both initial and comprehensive upgrades had been completed by the end of fiscal 2003.

It is “a substantial scaling back from earlier plans,” Bunn said, which called for completing such upgrades on 77 percent of these materials by the end of fiscal 2004.

That alleged scaling back, according to Bunn, also means “a drastic acceleration will be needed” to complete the security upgrades by the administration’s goal of the end of fiscal 2008. 

Wilkes said an acceleration was begun last year and the 2008 goal would be met.

Bunn said Abraham also used a different counting rule to make the claim that more material would be secured in fiscal 2003 and fiscal 2004 than during any other two-year period, by referring only to materials comprehensively secured.

“This statement is not correct if the same definition of `secured’ is used as in the 46-percent estimate — several previous two-year periods have been better by this definition,” he said.

Bunn said, using Abraham’s definition, progress on securing the material was “modestly better” in 2003 and 2004 than a previous program for upgrades in a two-year period.

He said, though, because of “poor performance” in 2002, “it remains true that less material received comprehensive upgrades” in the two years after 9/11 than during the two years prior.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action was produced with funding from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is produced independently by the National Journal Group.]

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