Overview
	Technical Background
	The Threat
Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials   Materials Protection, Control & Accounting   Warhead Security   Mayak Fissile Materials Storage Facility   BN-350 Fuel Security   Removing Materials from Vulnerable Sites   Converting Reseach Reactors   International Nuclear Security Upgrades   Global Standards
	Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling
	Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel
	Monitoring Stockpiles
	Ending Further Production
	Reducing Stockpiles

 

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Previous Publications
	Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: Recent Developments and Trends February2007 Readthe Full Report (1.5M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2006 The latest report in our series, from May 2006, finds that even though the gap between the threat of nuclear terrorism and the response has narrowed in recent years, there remains an unacceptable danger that terrorists might succeed in their quest to get and use a nuclear bomb, turning a modern city into a smoking ruin. Offering concrete steps to confront that danger, the report calls for world leaders to launch a fast-paced global coalition against nuclear terrorism focused on locking down all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide as rapidly as possible. Read the Executive Summary (379K PDF) or the Full Report (1.7M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives Our May 2005 report finds that while the United States and other countries laid important foundations for an accelerated effort to prevent nuclear terrorism in the last year, sustained presidential leadership will be needed to win the race to lock down the world’s nuclear stockpiles before terrorists and thieves can get to them. Read the Executive Summary (281 K) or the Full Report (1.9M PDF)
	Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action Building on the previous years' reports, this 2004 NTI-commissioned report grades current efforts and recommends new actions to more effectively prevent nuclear terrorism. It finds that programs to reduce this danger are making progress, but there remains a potentially deadly gap between the urgency of the threat and the scope and pace of efforts to address it. Download the Full Report (1.2 M PDF) Выписки из доклада по-русски (423K PDF)
	Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan 2003 report published by Harvard and NTI measures the progress made in keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of terrorist hands, and outlines a comprehensive plan to reduce the danger. Download the Full Report (2.7M PDF)
	Securing Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Seven Steps for Immediate Action 2002 report co-published by Harvard and NTI outlines seven urgent steps to reduce the threat of stolen nuclear weapons or materials falling into the hands of terrorists or hostile states. Read the Full Report (516K PDF)

Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials

Materials Protection Control and Accounting

Status

While Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Alexander Rumiantsev agreed to accelerate the MPC&A effort after September 11, and have met five times since then to work to overcome obstacles to acceleration, during the fiscal year starting shortly after the September 11 attacks, rapid upgrades were completed for only an additional 9% of Russia's potentially vulnerable nuclear material, and comprehensive upgrades for 2%.[2] Working with Russia, the United States should take immediate steps to accelerate and strengthen this effort, ensuring that all stockpiles of potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union:

This site provides an overview describing the MPC&A program's status and accomplishments; its budget; key issues now facing the program; and recommendations for achieving each of these three objectives. This site also provides an extensive set of links for more information available on the web.

Key technologies and approaches. The key technologies and approaches being implemented in the MPC&A program range from "rapid upgrades" such as bricking over windows, placing huge concrete blocks on top of material or in front of doors, and the like to comprehensive security and accounting systems, including fences, locked vaults, detectors, sensors, access controls, security cameras, tamper-resistant seals, and the like. One particularly important technology being widely implemented is the portal monitor detectors at doors and other key points that will set off an alarm if some one carrying plutonium or HEU out of the building. (See discussion in Technical Background.) In addition to such equipment upgrades, the program is working with recipient countries to train personnel in modern MPC&A approaches, get appropriate MPC&A procedures adopted at the relevant facilities, put in place effective MPC&A regulation, and build an infrastructure to supply and maintain MPC&A equipment, to ensure that effective security and accounting for nuclear material can be achieved, and sustained for the long haul.

Also in 1999, the program added the "Material Consolidation and Conversion" (MCC) initiative, focused on consolidating potentially vulnerable nuclear material in fewer sites and buildings, so as to achieve higher long-term security for the remaining sites at lower cost. After the Russian economic crisis of 1998 when guards were leaving their posts to forage for food, and at some sites the electricity that ran the security systems was shut off when the sites did not pay their bills the program added a substantially greater focus on measures to ensure the "sustainability" of the upgrades over time. In fiscal year 2002, DOE's "Second Line of Defense" program, focused on interdicting nuclear smuggling after material has been stolen, was folded in to the MPC&A program. (See "Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling.") After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when concern over the possibility of radiological "dirty bombs" increased, the program expanded to address urgent concerns over control of radiological sources in the former Soviet Union as well. (See "Radiological Material Control".)

Congress has moved to authorize MPC&A cooperation with any country where it may be needed, and at the G-8 summit in June 2002, the assembled leaders agreed on a "Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction" which called for assistance to "any recipient country" that might need assistance in securing materials related to weapons of mass destruction.

The MPC&A program is divided into several key components:

Civilian program. Russia's civilian nuclear facilities, many of them small, poorly protected, and with little revenue to invest in security and accounting, originally posed some of the most urgent proliferation risks in Russia. DOE has identified 18 Russian and 13 non-Russian civilian sites requiring MPC&A upgrades, holding some 40 tons of weapons-usable nuclear material, roughly 7% of the nuclear material outside of warheads in the former Soviet Union.[9] By the end of FY 2002, DOE completed initial rapid upgrades for 98% of the material in these facilities (with the final 2% expected to be completed by the end of FY 2004), and comprehensive upgrades for 54%; comprehensive upgrades for 98% of this material are expected to be completed by the end of FY2003.[10] Since the equipment upgrades at these sites are completed or nearing completion, some of the most important issues for these civilian facilities focus on putting in place the trained personnel, equipment infrastructure, procedures, and safeguards and security culture to ensure that modern security and accounting methods are actually implemented effectively, and sustaining security over time.

MINATOM Defense Complex. MINATOM's nuclear weapons complex, focused in 10 closed cities, contains some 500 tons of the roughly 600 tons of HEU and plutonium outside of warheads that are believed to exist in the former Soviet Union.[11] Because of the sensitivity of many of these sites, and disputes over where the United States can have access or what other means can be used to provide assurances that U.S. taxpayer funds are being used appropriately, progress in the MINATOM defense complex has been slow. As of early 2002, DOE had expected that by the end of FY 2002, 31% of the material in the defense complex will have initial rapid upgrades installed, including 6% that will have full comprehensive upgrades completed.[12] However, by the end of FY 2002, rapid upgrades had been completed on only 25% of the total material (an increase of 11% over the previous year), and comprehensive upgrades had been put in place on 4% of the 500 tons (an increase of only 1% over the previous year). The new target for the end of FY 2003 was to have rapid upgrades completed on 30% of the material, with fully 50% by FY 2004, while having comprehensive upgrades on 7% of the material by the end of FY 2003 and 12% by the end of FY 2004.[13] As of mid-2002, cooperative upgrades had still not begun at the four major nuclear weapons assembly-disassembly facilities in Russia, the most sensitive sites in Russia's weapons complex known to the Russians as the "serial production facilities." These sites are believed to contain huge amounts of nuclear material, though two of them are being closed down and may have all of their nuclear material removed, so that MPC&A upgrades would no longer be needed. Since the attacks of September 11, the MPC&A program has made a major effort to accelerate progress at these sites, with the new access agreement, new initiatives to accelerate processing of contracts to carry out upgrades, and a new focus on building central storage facilities to consolidate nuclear material from the many buildings where it now exists at each of these major MINATOM facilities.[14] Whether these initiatives will succeed in drastically accelerating the effort at these sites remains to be seen.

Navy program. The MPC&A program's cooperation with the Russian Navy began with securing HEU naval fuel, and then expanded to security upgrades for naval nuclear warhead sites as well now expanding to other types of warhead sites. (See Warhead Security.) At the beginning of FY 2003, the program had completed rapid upgrades on all of the estimated 60 tons of naval fuel, with only 2% remaining to have comprehensive upgrades applied (the remaining 2% is housed at two facilities, with the other nine housing naval fuel already under comprehensive upgrades). Meanwhile, comprehensive upgrades had been applied at seven of an estimated 42 sites housing Russian Navy nuclear warheads (with these seven sites holding an estimated 22% of the 4,000 total estimated number of Russian Navy warheads); rapid upgrades had been completed on all but a few of these sites, housing an estimated 99% of these warheads. By the end of FY 2004, the program expects to have completed rapid upgrades on 100% of the HEU naval fuel and the estimated 4,000 naval warheads, and comprehensive upgrades on 100% of the fuel, and 14 of the 42 sites that house warheads, 90% of which are at those 14 sites.[15] The Navy program has managed to move remarkably quickly in upgrading security at extraordinarily sensitive facilities — U.S. officials, by contrast, have been unwilling to allow Russian experts to even visit U.S. naval fuel facilities — by building a genuine partnership with Russian counterparts (including relying on a Russian integrating team in Moscow for much of the planning and design, and day-to-day efforts to move the projects forward), taking a flexible approach to the issue of access and assurances, and building trust and cooperation step-by-step (including maintaining a small and consistent U.S. team that the Russian side has come to trust). The program's success has also been helped immensely by having sustained high-level support in the Russian Navy — support that may have resulted in part from the U.S. approaches just mentioned. These lessons can and should be applied to other efforts to secure nuclear warheads and materials in Russia.[16]

National programs. The "National Programs and Sustainability" portion of the MPC&A program focuses on efforts that affect all the different types of sites — such as improving regulation of MPC&A throughout Russia, secure transportation of nuclear materials between sites, training of MPC&A personnel, putting in place a national computerized accounting system for nuclear material in Russia, and the like. In particular, this portion of the program has key responsibilities for a wide range of efforts to ensure that effective security and accounting for nuclear materials will be sustained over time — including after U.S. assistance phases out. During 2001, the program also launched the MPC&A Operations Monitoring (MOM) project, which installs monitoring cameras and other sensors at key points so that site management and Russian government officials can observe that nuclear material has not been stolen, and that MPC&A procedures and equipment are being used effectively, in near-real-time; non-sensitive portions of the data are provided to the United States to help confirm the effectiveness of U.S. assistance.[17] The MPC&A regulatory support programs are particularly important, as Russian nuclear facility managers, faced with a very difficult budget situation, will always have an incentive to cut back on spending for anything that does not bring in revenue —including security and accounting for nuclear materials — unless there is an effective regulator making clear that failing to meet stringent MPC&A standards will lead to fines or shutdowns. While the Russian nuclear regulatory agency remains much weaker than the nuclear agencies it is supposed to regulate, MPC&A regulation has been improving, and in recent years the regulators have ordered one site to halt operations until MPC&A deficiencies were corrected, and held up a license for another until improved MPC&A arrangements were put in place.[18]

Material Consolidation and Conversion (MCC). In 1999, the MPC&A program added an effort to consolidate nuclear material at fewer sites, and to blend down HEU removed from vulnerable sites to proliferation resistant low-enriched uranium (LEU).[19] The program has established two blending sites, at the Luch Production Association in Podolsk and the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dmitrovgrad. HEU is removed from potentially vulnerable sites and sent to these facilities, which blend the material to 19% enriched LEU, with transparency and monitoring arrangements negotiated with the MPC&A program. The program makes a payment to the blending sites for each kilogram of LEU produced by blending from HEU, which the blending sites use to cover their costs and help convince the donor sites to give up their HEU. The blending sites and MINATOM headquarters are responsible for convincing donor sites to send HEU to the blending sites. The blending sites have also agreed to spend 10% of the revenue on MPC&A upgrades at their facilities. Through the end of FY 2002, the program had blended down over 3 metric tons of HEU, and had removed material entirely from 21 of the 55 buildings it plans to empty of nuclear material.[20] Further progress has been slowed by the lack of a government-to-government agreement governing the MCC project. Once such an agreement is completed, the program hopes to be able to expand rapidly (and to consider providing incentives directly to facilities to give up their HEU), blending some 29 tons of HEU and removing all HEU from 55 buildings or more by the end of 2009.[21] In its FY 2004 budget proposal, the Bush administration proposed to increase the rate of down blending to up to five metric tons a year, if agreement could be reached with MINATOM on additional Russian sites to become part of the MCC project.[22]

Second Line of Defense. The Second Line of Defense project is substantially accelerating its efforts to install nuclear material detection equipment at key border crossings. See discussion in Interdicting Nuclear Smuggling.

Radiological Materials Control. In the aftermath of September 11, the MPC&A program has expanded to include improving controls over particularly dangerous radiological materials that could be used in a "dirty bomb" as well as plutonium and HEU that could be used in nuclear explosives. The program has established a cooperative program with Russia to deal with radiological materials in Russia, and with Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to address radiological materials elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. The program is analyzing the potential impacts of different types of dirty bomb attacks, categorizing the threats posed by different types of materials, identifying sites around the world where particularly dangerous materials exist, analyzing what commercially available equipment and techniques can best be used to reduce the threat, and developing a prioritized action plan. Initially, the program began work at four pilot sites (both to address particularly urgent threats and to provide further information for developing more comprehensive plans). The four pilot sites were a low-level radioactive waste storage facility managed by "RADON" in Russia (a large vulnerable site needing better security); airport and seaport facilities in Lithuania (a key potential transit point); and Uzbekistan and Georgia (where the program is helping to locate and secure dangerous lost or "orphan" sources).[23] The program has since identified at least 34 additional "RADON" sites in Russia and the former Soviet Union that may require immediate security improvements, as well as numerous other agricultural research institutes, research reactors, medical clinics, industrial sites and defense installations housing highly radioactive sources that may require security upgrades. In addition, the program has made a high priority of locating and consolidating an estimated 1,000 "orphan sources" located throughout the former Soviet Union. By the end of FY 2004, the program hopes to have completed the requisite security upgrades at some 18 sites in the former Soviet Union (ten in Russia), and secured over 400 sources.[24]

Budget

See budget table

Although the incoming Bush administration attempted to cut the budget for the MPC&A program in fiscal year (FY) 2002, Congress rejected that attempt and then added $150 million in emergency supplemental funds after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The final FY 2002 budget for the MPC&A program is $312.8 million, including $171.9 million in "base" appropriations and $150 million in emergency supplemental appropriations. This funding level is sufficient so that the pace of the program is not substantially budget-limited. Nevertheless, with the new focus on radiological materials, on countries all over the world, and on addressing terrorist threats of the scale demonstrated on September 11 (or in the October, 2002 Chechen hostage taking at a Moscow theater), there are additional steps that could be taken that would require additional resources.

The Bush administration proposed cutting the MPC&A program to $227.1 million in FY 2003 (taking into account the transfer of a $6 million Nuclear Assessment Program formerly part of the Second Line of Defense program to the Department of Homeland Security), arguing that this would be sufficient as the high funding level provided in FY 2002 would take some time to spend out. (The FY 2003 request included $24 million for Second Line of Defense, leaving $209.1 million for the "core" MPC&A program, compared to $266.6 million for this "core" part of the effort in FY 2002.) In the Omnibus Appropriations bill passed in February 2003, which included funding for the MPC&A program, Congress appears to have approved the administration's request.[25]

For the FY 2004 budget, the administration has requested $227 million for the MPC&A program, including $24 million for the Second Line of Defense program and $1 million for an Accelerated Material Consolidation and Conversion initiative.[26] For the "core" MPC&A program, without the Second Line of Defense program included, the budget request is $203 million.

The total projected program cost (as of early 2001, not including states outside the former Soviet Union and not including radiological material, both added since then) is $2.2 billion, with $1.36 billion appropriated through FY 2003. In every year since MPC&A has existed as a separate line item, Congress has provided either 100% or more than what the administration requested, demonstrating the strong bipartisan support for securing nuclear warheads and materials.

Key Issues and Recommendations

Accelerating the effort. Since September 11, accelerating the upgrades effort as much as possible, so as to reduce the threat U.S. and international security as rapidly as practicable, has been a key focus of the MPC&A program. As the non-Russian sites and the Russian civilian sites are already completed or nearing completion, and the Russian Navy sites are also moving very rapidly, the key area where acceleration is needed is the large MINATOM defense complex facilities.To succeed in getting these stockpiles as secure as possible as fast as possible, the United States and Russia will have to (a) rebuild a partnership approach that can sustain broad Russian support; (b) set an agreed deadline; (c) jointly develop a strategic plan to meet the deadline; (d) provide the necessary resources to carry out the plan; (e) resolve the access issues; and (f) overcome the many bureaucratic obstacles.

• Recommendation: The United States and Russia should jointly set a target of accomplishing all "rapid upgrades" of security and accounting for warheads and materials within two years and comprehensive upgrades within four.
  
• Recommendation: The United States and Russia should provide the funding and personnel resources needed to accomplish the goal of upgrading security and accounting for all nuclear warheads and materials as rapidly as technology will allow. The goal of keeping nuclear material out of terrorist hands should not be allowed to be constrained by lack of funds.

Focusing high-level attention. Achieving these goals will require sustained, high-level leadership attention in both Washington and Moscow, focused on driving the process forward and overcoming obstacles as they arise. In both countries, high-level attention in the past has been occasional, and has often not focused in a sustained way on making sure rapid progress continues to be made. This has often allowed bureaucratic obstacles (on both sides of the Atlantic) to delay progress for months or years at a time. A particularly important issue is convincing the Russian government and the managers of Russian nuclear facilities to move modern MPC&A higher on the priority list for allocation of their own resources, rolling back the unfortunate "culture of dependency" on U.S. MPC&A assistance that has begun to build up at many Russian nuclear sites.

• Recommendation: Senior political leaders in the United States and Russia should put in the sustained leadership needed to resolve bureaucratic obstacles as they arise and keep this effort moving forward as quickly as possible, rather than allowing problems to fester.

Ensuring that security will be sustained and implementing an exit strategy. Clearly, installing modern equipment that is never used, or cannot be maintained, or that the site does not have the resources or the trained personnel to operate effectively, will not solve the MPC&A problem. And U.S. assistance will not last forever ultimately the nuclear materials in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union are theirs to protect, and this must eventually be done with their own resources. To go from installing equipment to achieving effective security and accounting that will be sustained for the long haul, after U.S. assistance phases out, requires helping the Russian government change the way thousands of people at nuclear facilities in Russia do their day-to-day jobs changing procedures, training, regulation, incentives, and more throughout the nuclear security system. Designing cost-effective approaches to achieving that goal is the biggest intellectual and policy challenge facing the MPC&A program.[27]

• Recommendation: The MPC&A program should give very high priority to ensuring that effective security and accounting will be sustained for the long haul. The program should be designed around an exit strategy focused on ensuring an effective transition from dependence on U.S. funding to sustainable security based on the states of the former Soviet Union's own resources. Recommendation: The United States should seek a clear commitment from the Russian government to provide its own resources to sustain and improve the security and accounting systems now being put in place once U.S. assistance phases out.

• Recommendation: The United States should focus intensely on building up strong MPC&A regulation in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union, to ensure that nuclear facilities will only be allowed to continue to operate if they have effective MPC&A in place.
  
  
• Recommendation: The United States should send the message that high standards of security and accounting for nuclear material are part of the "price of admission" for any facility to get lucrative contracts from the United States and work to convince other leading nuclear states to do the same.
  

Consolidating material in fewer buildings and sites. Greatly reducing the number of buildings and sites where potential bomb material is located is critical if Russia is to be able to sustain high security for the long term at reasonable cost. As noted above, more progress on consolidation is certainly needed. Recommendation: The United States should work with the Russian government to offer incentives tailored to the needs of each facility to convince small, vulnerable Russian facilities to give up their stockpiles of HEU or plutonium, consolidating them in secure central storage facilities. The consolidation effort should be substantially accelerated and expanded, and should focus less on blending down HEU (where it can make only a modest contribution compared to the 30 tons per year already being blended down in the HEU Purchase Agreement) and more on ensuring that all weapons-usable nuclear material is removed from as many buildings and sites as possible.

Building a safeguards and security culture in Russia. Effective security and accounting for nuclear materials requires, ultimately, a deeply rooted "safeguards culture," in which each participant understands the rules and why they are important, their own role in ensuring that nuclear materials are not stolen, and the importance of that role to their country and to the world. Changes in culture do not happen overnight, and many different factors, from training to regulation to generational change, will have an impact.[28]

• Recommendation: The United States and Russia should place high priority on measures to build an effective safeguards and security culture. Nonproliferation training is one important element of building such a culture: many of the guards at nuclear facilities in Russia and around the world have no real idea of the importance of what they are guarding that they are on the frontlines of the global struggle to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands.

Building the partnership. Much of the work that remains to be done is at highly sensitive nuclear weapons complex facilities or nuclear weapon storage sites. This work will simply not get done quickly without genuine enthusiasm for moving it forward on the part of Russian government officials and site managers which is only likely to be forthcoming if the work is implementing approaches that they understand and had a hand in designing. And sustaining security over time will also require that Russian officials and experts, from the President and Prime Minister down to the guards and workers using the security and accounting systems every day, "buy in" to the need for the new approach to security and accounting of nuclear weapons and nuclear material. Moreover, however much American experts have learned about Russian facilities, Russian safeguards approaches, Russian rules and regulations, and the Russian bureaucratic system in recent years, Russian experts inevitably understand these matters better than Americans do. For all these reasons, building a genuine partnership in which Russian experts are integrated into, and come to support, all aspects of the planning, design, and implementation of the effort is crucial to success. Unfortunately, in recent years, some of the U.S. programs have too frequently taken a "made in America" approach, drafting strategic plans without any Russian input, setting standards for what security levels should be achieved and how without any Russian input, and reviewing progress in the programs without asking the Russians for their assessments. As might be expected, these approaches have provoked considerable negative reactions on the Russian side, significantly undermining progress in some areas.[29]

• Recommendation: In order to accomplish the goal of achieving effective and sustainable security for all nuclear material as rapidly as possible, the United States and Russia should shift from an assistance-based approach to one based on genuine partnership, in which Russian experts would be integrated into every aspect of the planning, design, and implementation of the effort, and Russia's own resources would help fund the cooperative effort. In particular, the two sides should develop a truly joint strategic plan for meeting the agreed targets and milestones. Joint research and development on improved MPC&A technologies should also be pursued.

Strengthening security to meet the threat. It is critically important to ensure that the security and accounting systems installed in such joint efforts are adequate to defeat the threats they are likely to face. This raises the obvious question: "how much is enough?" Obviously it will not be possible in the near term to make a Fort Knox of every facility with plutonium or HEU and it is surely more important to get all the materials upgraded to at least a minimum effective level first, rather than securing some material to a very high standard while leaving the rest unprotected. But it is equally crucial to ensure that the designs of the security systems do not underestimate the likely threats. The MPC&A systems for plutonium and HEU now being put in place in the cooperative program would, if used appropriately, be highly effective in blocking the most common type of threat seen so far the casual insider thief, who steals material without any very elaborate effort to cover his tracks. They also offer some significant improvement in security against a small group of outside attackers. But they are not designed to offer protection larger threats that can easily be imagined, such as the management of a facility deciding to sell off the material there, or a rogue military unit taking over a facility, or substantial conspiracies of insiders working together, or several small groups of well-armed and well-trained attackers attacking at once (in effect, the September 11 threat). Careful joint U.S.-Russian consideration of what level of threat these systems should be designed to meet, in the post-September 11 world, is needed.

• Recommendation: The United States and Russia should reach agreement on at least the general outline of the design basis threat the jointly installed security systems are to be designed to meet, and put in place a program of regular vulnerability assessments and realistic performance tests to monitor each site's ability to protect itself against the agreed threat.

Access and assurances. The tug-of-war between U.S. and Russian officials over how much access U.S. experts could have at sensitive Russian facilities has been one of the most critical factors delaying progress in the MPC&A program. Indeed, as of early 2001, when relevant data was publicly released, the buildings where "rapid upgrades" had not yet been done were almost entirely the buildings where U.S. experts had not been granted access.[30] Clearly, if U.S. taxpayers are going to be paying for MPC&A improvements, there needs to be some method of providing assurances that the money allocated for that purpose is being spent appropriately. At the same time, many of the facilities involved are some of the most sensitive and secret locations in Russia; unless suspicion between the United States and Russia entirely disappears, there will continue to be some places where nuclear weapons or weapons-usable materials are located where U.S. personnel simply will not be allowed to go (just as there are some places in the United States where security officials would not let Russians go). Providing assurances that the taxpayer's funds are being spent appropriately does not always have to rely on direct on-site presence by U.S. personnel a variety of other methods, including photos and videotapes of installed equipment, certifications by "trusted agents" (such as Russian citizens with Russian security clearances employed by U.S. companies) and the like can also suffice. Although the September 2001 agreement on MPC&A access has allowed work to be restarted at a number of facilities, there are still a number of important facilities where the issue of access or non-access assurances has not been resolved and work is not going forward. Flexibility on both sides will be needed.

• Recommendation: Both the United States and Russia should take a flexible approach to the issue of access and assurances, keeping in mind that the preeminent goal is to secure and account for every warhead and every kilogram of nuclear material, not every dollar. Russia should offer increased access at some sensitive sites, under the new access agreement. The United States should offer limited reciprocal access at sensitive sites in the United States, and be willing to accept, in certain limited circumstances, the possibility of providing assurance that the taxpayer's funds are being spent appropriately without the physical presence of U.S. personnel. Senior DOE and DOD officials need to work closely with Congress in making the case that it is possible to have high confidence that U.S. assistance is being used appropriately even in the absence of direct U.S. access to these sensitive facilities.

Sustaining the effort in the non-Russian states. As noted above, the MPC&A upgrades for nuclear facilities in the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union were declared completed in 1999, and continuing support for MPC&A at those facilities was shifted to the Department of Energy's International Safeguards division. The MPC&A program has, however, continued to provide a modest amount of funding to help ensure that security at these sites is sustained. There is more to be done, however, including in strengthening MPC&A regulation in these states.

• Recommendation: DOE should provide additional resources to support sustainability efforts in the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union, including support for effective regulation of MPC&A. At the same time, every effort should be made to remove the weapons-usable nuclear material entirely from as many of these facilities as possible (potentially all of them), using an incentives-based approach as described under consolidation, above.

Expanding around the globe. The problem of insecure nuclear material is not limited to the former Soviet Union it is a global problem. Efforts to remove nuclear material from vulnerable sites and improve security and accounting where such materials will remain must therefore be global as well.

• Recommendation: For recommendations for MPC&A improvements in the rest of the world, see Global Cleanout and Global Secure.

New approaches to program management. Management of the MPC&A program has been a very challenging task from the outset, forcing managers to cope with political, budgetary, and technical issues related to hundreds of projects at scores of facilities, located a world away from Washington, DC. With the program having expanded and accelerated, there is a need for (a) reduced both internal and external secrecy and compartmentalization; (b) increased oversight and peer review; and (c) an improved balance between the responsibilities of DOE headquarters, the DOE laboratories, Russian laboratories, and U.S. and Russian private-sector firms. The control of information within the program is so tight that it is difficult for different parts of the program to learn each other's lessons or for outsiders to provide well-informed advice. While the program does have a Technical Survey Team to review the progress of each of the projects, it has no independent advisory body or mechanism for oversight of its broad policy approaches to its mission, as many other programs do. And the program has progressively concentrated all decision-making, even over technical matters where U.S. and Russian laboratory experts have more knowledge and