<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:88591.wais]
COMBATING TERRORISM: PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY,
VETERANS AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 24, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-231
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
88-591 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 2003
____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpr.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512ÿ091800
Fax: (202) 512ÿ092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402ÿ090001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
STEPHEN HORN, California CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia DC
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
BOB BARR, Georgia ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JIM TURNER, Texas
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
DAVE WELDON, Florida WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
CHRIS CANNON, Utah DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho ------ ------
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia ------
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma (Independent)
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
James C. Wilson, Chief Counsel
Robert A. Briggs, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International
Relations
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut, Chairman
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York TOM LANTOS, California
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
DAVE WELDON, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Lawrence J. Halloran, Staff Director and Counsel
R. Nicholas Palarino, Senior Policy Analyst
Jason Chung, Clerk
David Rapallo, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on September 24, 2002............................... 1
Statement of:
Baram, Amatzia, professor of middle east history and head of
the Jewish-Arab Center and Middle East Institute........... 85
Bryan, Danielle, executive director, the Project on
Government Oversight....................................... 79
Bunn, Matthew, senior research associate, project on managing
the atom, Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University................................................. 28
Gottemoeller, Rose, senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace........................................ 65
Hamza, Khidhir, president, Council on Middle Eastern Affairs,
former director general, Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program..... 8
Lee, Rensslear, research associate, Foreign Affairs, Defense,
and Trade Division, Congressional Research Service......... 52
Paine, Christopher, senior researcher, Natural Resources
Defense Council............................................ 77
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Bryan, Danielle, executive director, the Project on
Government Oversight, prepared statement of................ 83
Bunn, Matthew, senior research associate, project on managing
the atom, Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University, prepared statement of.......................... 32
Gottemoeller, Rose, senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, prepared statement of................. 68
Hamza, Khidhir, president, Council on Middle Eastern Affairs,
former director general, Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program,
prepared statement of...................................... 12
Lee, Rensslear, research associate, Foreign Affairs, Defense,
and Trade Division, Congressional Research Service,
prepared statement of...................................... 55
Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Connecticut, prepared statement of............ 3
COMBATING TERRORISM: PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM
----------
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs
and International Relations,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:07 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher
Shays (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shays, Kucinich, Schakowsky and
Tierney.
Staff present: Lawrence J. Halloran, Staff Director and
Counsel; R. Nicholas Palarino, Senior Policy Advisor; Thomas
Costa, Professional Staff Member; Jason M. Chung, Clerk; Jarrel
Price, Intern; David Rapallo, Minority Counsel; and Earley
Green, Minority Assistant Clerk.
Mr. Shays. A quorum being present. The Subcommittee on
National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations
hearing entitled, ``Combating Terrorism: Preventing Nuclear
Terrorism,'' is called to order.
Early this month the International institute For Strategic
Studies issued an assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction programs. The report concluded Saddam Hussein's
nuclear programming probably needs several years to produce
enough fissile material for a weapon, but if Iraq were to
acquire enough enriched uranium from foreign sources, Saddam
could have the bomb in a matter of months.
That chilling scenario leads us to ask, where would Iraq,
al Qaeda or Hezbollah go shopping for the missing core of their
malevolent atomic aspirations? How can the threat of nuclear
terrorism be reduced?
As we will hear today from witnesses expert in nuclear
programs and nonproliferation efforts, a global radiological
bazaar has opened for business since the demise of the Soviet
Union. The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported 17
confirmed incidents since 1993 involved diversion of plutonium
or highly enriched uranium. Some of that material has never
been recovered. More than 300 research reactors in 58 nations
generate weapons-grade uranium kept under security arrangements
ranging from adequate to appalling.
To be sure, acquiring and building a nuclear device
involves complex technical challenges and requires more visible
infrastructure than terrorists generally prefer, but the
growing public record of attempts by Osama bin Laden and others
to purchase fissile fuel and other radiological material
demonstrates a determination we dare not underestimate or
dismiss.
The threat also lurks here at home, where nuclear weapons
labs, civilian generating facilities and even medical waste
storage sites stand as tempting targets for those seeking to
spread radioactive terror.
In May, I joined a congressional delegation led by Indiana
Senator Richard Lugar to examine the progress of cooperative
threat reduction efforts in the former Soviet Union. That trip
blew my mind. We saw the obvious benefits of facilities like
the fissile material storage facility at Mayak, Russia, where
roughly $1 trillion worth of uranium and plutonium will be
secured. But much material remains to be protected, and the
expertise to make more needs to be productively reemployed.
While this is our first hearing on these issues, it will
not be the last. The shape and scope of current threat
reduction programs to staunch the availability of dangerous
nuclear materials are being discussed by conferees on the 2003
defense authorization bill. In the coming months we need to
hear from the administration, from our government and private
partners in this efforts, and from scientists on how
effectively the threat of nuclear terrorism is being addressed.
We thank all our witnesses for coming this morning. We look
forward to their testimony.
And I am going to remind people that what you hear is
available to the public. This is not a closed hearing. I will
say as a Member of Congress, I am tired of the number of
hearings that are so-called secret that the American people
have a right to know. And if they just listened to what was
being discussed today, they would learn almost, if not more
than, frankly, what I learned behind closed doors.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.002
Mr. Shays. I recognize my ranking member, Mr. Kucinich, who
has been very, very active on this committee.
Mr. Kucinich. I want to thank the Chair for his ongoing
efforts to protect the security of the United States of
America. I want to indicate my appreciation for your
conscientiousness in that regard.
I want to welcome all our witnesses here. Each of them has
raised concerns regarding potential vulnerability to nuclear
terrorism ranging from insufficient security of nuclear
materials in the former Soviet states, to lack of import
controls at our borders, to the inadequate protection of
nuclear facilities right here in the United States.
In addition, we also have as this hearing's keynote speaker
Dr. Khidhir Hamza as someone who has worked inside the Iraqi
nuclear weapons program. Dr. Hamza will offer insight into the
research that was ongoing during his tenure years ago.
I must indicate, Mr. Chairman, that in my preparation for
today's hearings, after reviewing some of Dr. Hamza's
statements to the press, I have to express my concern because I
have seen statements that indicate that Dr. Hamza has said or
implied that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks. I
know that the FBI has been critical for failing to connect the
dots, but as far as I know, they have no evidence or even a
reasonable suspicion that Saddam Hussein was involved in any
way with the anthrax attacks. We spend billions of dollars with
our U.S. intelligence agencies, and they have scoured every bit
of evidence at their disposal. They have not made that
connection, nor have they made a connection, as Dr. Hamza has
stated, that Hussein has cooperated and collaborated with al
Qaeda, because at this point in the briefings I have been privy
to, there has been no connection between Iraq and September 11,
nor Iraq and al Qaeda, or Hussein and al Qaeda, or the anthrax
attacks. So I am interested in hearing from Dr. Hamza as to how
he was able to crack both of these cases when our own
government could not do so.
Even more troubling, and directly related to the subject of
today's hearings, Dr. Hamza has stated that Saddam Hussein has
nuclear weapons; not just that he is developing them or is
seeking to acquire them, but that he currently possesses them.
Now, again, I have received briefings, and no one in the
briefings I have received has been able to establish that Iraq
currently possesses any kind of usable nuclear weapons.
I understand that Dr. Hamza defected to the United States
back in 1994, and that it has been several years since he
actually worked on the Iraqi nuclear program, and since then
our United Nations inspectors have been to Iraq and located
facilities and have destroyed them. If, in fact, Iraq has
acquired nuclear weapons since the inspectors left in 1998, we
need to know that. We need to know how anyone has come by that
information, and how it was obtained, and how our intelligence
agencies missed it.
I will say that there are things that Dr. Hamza and I may
agree on. I was one of those Members of Congress, Mr. Chairman,
as I think you were, too, who voted in 1998 for this country to
take a position which reflected disfavor upon the regime of
Saddam Hussein and indicated we would support efforts to remove
him. Of course, I do not go as far as some would today in
saying that assassination and regime change by force are
acceptable, but I did vote for that resolution.
I agreed that the record of Mr. Hussein in killing and
torturing his own people and using chemical weapons against
them and flouting U.N. resolutions should be held to
accountability, but judging from the statements that have been
made to the media, there are people who want to send in troops,
U.S. troops, to settle the score with Hussein no matter how
little support this country has in the world community, no
matter how many lives we have to sacrifice, no matter how great
the degree of regional conflagration, and no matter that they
do not have a plan as to what to do after we conquer Iraq.
So, Mr. Chairman, understanding the gravity of this
meeting, I would look to offer Dr. Hamza a little bit of
unsolicited advice. When you are here today, Doctor, you are
not speaking just to a media forum, you are speaking to the
U.S. Congress, and you will be under oath, and you will be
speaking on a topic of utmost gravity which reflects for many
people here a question of whether or not the United States of
America should send hundreds of thousands of its young men and
women directly into harm's way. So I hope that you will
recognize that some will use your statements here today to try
to justify an all-out attack on Iraq that would result in the
deaths of many Americans as well as the deaths of many innocent
Iraqi civilians.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman.
We are joined by Ms. Schakowsky, the gentlewoman from
Illinois, and a very competent member of this committee.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you and
Mr. Kucinich for convening this hearing. This is a timely
discussion since the issue of nuclear terrorism has been a
topic of concern for the administration, the Congress and the
American people.
In a recent speech before the United Nations, President
Bush suggested that a primary reason for taking military action
against Iraq is that Saddam Hussein is seeking nuclear weapons
which he could provide to terrorists. Administration officials
also have stated that they have intelligence indicating that al
Qaeda operatives are actively seeking to obtain nuclear
weapons.
I consider these statements to be great cause of concern,
and it is important that we analyze this issue very carefully.
We need to understand the different ways terrorist groups can
acquire radiological and nuclear weapons and ways to prevent
such actions from occurring. I am eager to learn about the
expertise and resources that terrorists would need to build a
radiological or nuclear weapon.
Another important issue to investigate is what current
safeguards exist and what new ones need to be put in place to
protect our homeland against such a deadly attack, and I am
hoping these concerns will be addressed in today's hearing.
When discussing threats of terrorist groups and nations
using weapons of mass destruction on the United States and our
allies, the current debate of whether we should attack Iraq is
so important. One of the underlying reasons that the
administration claims to support a preemptive strike against
Iraq is the idea that Iraq may supply weapons of mass
destruction to terrorist groups who will in turn use them on
the United States and its allies.
In the President's national security strategy report for
2002, it is stated that the administration has ``irrefutable
proof'' that Iraq has acquired nuclear weapons. In fact, if
irrefutable proof exists, why has the President not yet
presented it to the Congress or the American people? Where is
the proof that these nuclear weapons are being sold to
terrorist groups?
Another issue of concern to me is our policy on nuclear
proliferation. Why is the President only concentrating on
Iraq's nuclear ambitions and ignoring the countless numbers of
insecure nuclear facilities across the globe? Why is the
President not making sure that Russia's stockpile of uranium,
for example, is not made more secure? Why is the President not
working harder to prevent nuclear scientists all over the world
from joining the ranks of terrorist organizations and rogue
nations?
A new investment in nonproliferation would help convince a
skeptical world that we are serious about nuclear
proliferation. By solely concentrating our interest on Iraq, it
is getting harder to convince the world that it is just about
weapons of mass destruction, not domestic politics or oil or
revenge. Instead of spending $200 billion on a war with Iraq,
we could invest in nonproliferation, which would make more of a
positive impact on the global war on terrorism and would
actually make us safer than a unilateral war on Iraq would.
I am hoping that today's hearing will shed some more light
on these important issues. Nuclear terrorism is a serious topic
that must not be overlooked. We must make sure that terrorist
groups never get their hands on such destructive and deadly
weapons. However, it is also very important that before we go
after these organizations with military action, that we must
have absolute proof that they have nuclear weapons in their
possession.
But when dealing with rogue nations such as Iraq, the
situation becomes even more complicated. Dismantling a
terrorist organization is one thing, but preemptively attacking
an entire nation is something else. If nuclear weapons do exist
in Iraq, are we actually going to be safer if we launch this
kind of unilateral preemptive attack?
It is important for us to work with the international
community to continue to force weapons inspection. I believe in
coercive inspections to resume in Iraq and continue to isolate
Iraq if they continue to push back. It is vital that we work
with our international allies and others in the international
community to make sure we look over all possible options in
preventing these groups and nations from acquiring such weapons
before we look to military solutions.
Where we have concerns, we must undertake aggressive
efforts to protect this Nation. When the threat is imminent,
the President has many tools and options at his disposal to
deal with that threat. However, it is imperative that, when
time and circumstances permit, we exercise all diplomatic
options before sending our young men and women into war and
into harm's way. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
I will announce our panel and welcome them. I will swear
them in. I want to apologize from the start. You are somewhat
cramped, but we thought the synergy with the seven of you would
be very helpful.
I will also say that you have 5 minutes to make a
statement, but if you run over close to 10, I would stop you.
But you have more than 5, and I am also going to say that we do
not do the 5-minute rule particularly when we have so few
Members. If a number of you want to jump in and answer a
question, you can.
So we are going to learn a lot today, and it will be very
informative.
Our panel is comprised of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, president,
Council on Middle Eastern Affairs, former director general,
Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It blows me away. Mr. Matthew
Bunn, senior research associate, project on managing the atom,
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; Dr. Rensslear Lee,
consultant, Foreign Affairs Defense and Trade Division,
Congressional Research Service; Ms. Rose Gottemoeller, senior
associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Mr.
Christopher Paine, senior researcher, National Resources
Defense Council; Ms. Danielle Bryan, executive director of the
Project on Government Oversight; Dr. Amatzia Baram, professor
of Middle East history, University of Haifa, head of the
Jewish-Arab Center and Middle East Institute.
We welcome all of you. I would ask you all to stand. As you
know, we swear in all of our witnesses.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. I will note for the record the witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
I ask unanimous consent that all members of the
subcommittee be permitted to place an opening statement in the
record and that the record remain open for 3 days for that
purpose. Without objection, so ordered.
I ask further unanimous consent that witnesses be permitted
to include their witness statements in the record. Without
objection, so ordered. That enables you, particularly those who
will follow, because we are going down the row here, if you
want to submit your testimony and speak extemporaneously, feel
free to do that. It is 5 minutes, then a rollover.
Dr. Hamza.
STATEMENT OF KHIDHIR HAMZA, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON MIDDLE
EASTERN AFFAIRS, FORMER DIRECTOR GENERAL, IRAQI NUCLEAR WEAPONS
PROGRAM
Mr. Hamza. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members.
Thank you. If I may answer some of the questions raised earlier
about my earlier statements. The anthrax, I did not say Iraq.
Mr. Shays. Let me do this. Give us your statement, and I
will let you answer those questions--this is a sneaky way for
him to ask questions before--and feel free to respond to those
questions. And important, I was joking.
Mr. Hamza. The Iraqi program--actually the Institute for
Strategic Studies of London that did a study of the Iraqi
nuclear weapon program did declare, like the inspectors did,
that the Iraq do possess a working design for a nuclear weapon.
It has all the components needed for a nuclear weapon except
for fissile core, the nuclear core.
Iraq has a program, a larger program, to produce fissile
materials locally. Iraq has local resources for natural uranium
production from its phosphates. It has already delivered to the
inspectors 160 tons produced locally from natural resources. It
has its own uranium stockpile right now; the Germans estimate
something like 10 tons of natural uranium, 1.3 tons of
slightly--average uranium.
The Institute states that Iraq, if it has fissile material
right now, acquired it, has through black market or other
means, it could produce a nuclear weapon within months,
probably 6 months. The estimate is correct, but I think it
misses the point on one aspect, and that is Iraq program is
more serious than this. This is a program that is meant to
produce an arsenal of nuclear weapons, not just one. One
nuclear weapon would not provide the regime with the deterrence
it needs to stay in power long enough and to be protected in
such a way that it could menace its neighbors, be the bully of
the region, do whatever Saddam wants to do. He already invaded
two countries of his neighbors, and if he wants to continue on
this path, he needs a much more credible deterrence than one
nuclear weapon, because if he does that, he loses.
The Iraqi program is meant is to produce average uranium to
bomb grade and has--it has two technologies to do that, already
resolved with all the bottlenecks in these technologies. One
was provided to them by the German scientist, Karl Schaab, who
already was on trial in Germany, and because of the complacency
of the German Government and allowing him to go ahead and
supplying us with the technology needed for the uranium
enrichment, the judge was sympathetic and sentenced him only to
time served. So actually the only man who could smuggle nuclear
technology into the weapon area to Iraq is out of jail and
actually served no serious jail time. He was sentenced to time
served and something like $32,000 in fines.
What we have in Iraq is really a program that, put
together, it could in 2 to 3 years produce fissile material
enough--I estimate it could be in 2 years operational, and in 3
years it would have enough nuclear material for two to three
nuclear weapons.
I did not say that Iraq has right now nuclear weapons. The
London Times misquoted the report or misquoted my statement.
And when I sent the correction, he said it was too late for the
print, for the issue to come out.
The Iraq, the timeframe I stated earlier in my testimony to
Congress, to the Senate, is that in 2 to 3 years, I expect Iraq
will have enough equipment put together to produce enough
material for nuclear weapons.
The inspectors right now, the issue of inspectors going
back in, inspectors were in Iraq, they did dismantle most of
Iraq's nuclear infrastructure. The remaining issue in disarming
Iraq is not just equipment and facilities. What is needed is
really the whole infrastructure that makes weapons be
dismantled. That includes scientists and knowledge base.
Nothing on that was done by the inspectors. The inspectors
were not given full access to scientists. Managers were always
there during inspections. They didn't get the straight story
from the scientists. They got the story as the Government of
Iraq wanted them to get. So if the inspectors are to be
effective, if they go back to Iraq, a measure has to be taken
to force the Iraqi Government to allow them to talk to the
scientists outside Iraq, without their managers. And, if
possible, so that no retribution can be taken by the Iraqi
Government against their families, their families go with them.
If the measure is to mean anything, if sending the inspectors
back in is to be effective and is to be the solution of the
problem, then that is the accompanying measure that has to go
with it, the scientists be talked to outside Iraq.
The only time it happened is three scientists were sent to
Vienna to talk to the inspectors in 1993, and the scientists
were chosen by the Iraqi Government, not by the inspectors. The
inspectors then didn't know much about the personnel working in
the program and the scientists, so the choice was made by the
Iraqi Government.
Right now there is much more information on who is who in
the Iraqi program, who can provide more information, and the
choice could be decided by the inspectors and the U.S.
Government, and not by the Iraqi Government.
The weapons area, nuclear materials availability in the
black market, I believe, is overstated. I do not think it is as
easy as it has been built. I don't think you can just go ahead
and buy fissile material on the market at will. In the Soviet
Union we found out--the former Soviet Union and Russia after
the fall of the Soviet Union, there were just too many sting
operations going on. It was too dangerous for Iraqi operatives
to go in and just buy nuclear material.
I talked to a Soviet expert here a few years back, and he
told me there are more sellers in the Soviet Union, in Russia,
right now than buyers. I do not believe it. There might be more
sellers than buyers, but they would be mostly part of a sting
operation.
So the Iraqi program was directed not to purchase of black
market nuclear material basically, it was directed to a local
production on a larger scale, and I believe this is more
dangerous and more of concern than just trying to clamp down on
available material outside of Iraq. The bigger concern is that
Iraq will have its own production facilities in the nuclear
area, and then you are dealing with major nuclear power after a
while, and would that be an acceptable future one would want
for the Middle East with Iraq in possession of several nuclear
weapons sitting right there in the region and doing what it
wants under a nuclear umbrella, and it would be much more
dangerous to get rid of Saddam after that.
I think the training needed for terrorism and nuclear
weapon area, nuclear radiation area, is more than what is
available to terrorist groups on their own right now. If one
remembers, al Qaeda documents that were discovered in their
hideouts were primitive. They were not on a level that
terrorists could use comfortably or be in a grasp of enough
knowledge and training to be able to deal comfortably or safely
with nuclear materials.
I believe what is needed is a state support to get this
going. That's why al Qaeda knew this when they tried to contact
the Pakistani scientist, his name, I believe, was Dr. Hamood,
one of the former directors of one of the reactors, and it was
immediately found out by Pakistani security, and he was
interrogated, and the operation is stopped. So what is needed
by a terrorist is more of a safe haven, a state sponsor that
would provide them with this training and information safely
without being ``right in the middle'' and the operation is
stopped.
September 11 would tell us that modern-day terrorists are
more in the information area, in the training area. What the
terrorists brought with them was training and information on
what to do, and I believe a terrorist in the nuclear area would
need this more than actual having his hand actually on some
radioactive material which he can bring with him. I think they
will be found out to where they will have problem transporting
them, getting them to where he want to get them, and putting
them in such a way he could spread them or cause damage with
them.
A safer bet would be that he will be trained on how to
handle a certain weapons site or certain repository of nuclear
material, either blow it up or find a way to get some of the
material outside of that site and use it.
I think I will reserve the rest of the question.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hamza follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.003
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.004
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.005
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.006
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.007
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.008
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.009
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.010
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.011
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.012
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.013
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.014
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.015
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.016
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.017
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.018
Mr. Shays. Let me do this: Let me have you respond now, and
then we will have questions later, but I did interrupt you, and
you wanted to respond to the issues of claiming that Iraq was
responsible.
Mr. Hamza. Actually the Congressman mentioned two major
things. I already answered one. I never said that Iraq is in
possession of nuclear weapons. I was quoted as saying,
improperly, by some British reporter. Most of what he wrote was
correct except the time. He said 2 to 3 months. I did not say
that. I said 2 to 3 years.
The other issue is the anthrax. I never said Iraq is known
to have done the anthrax. What I said is Dr. Richard Spurcel,
the chief weapons inspector for the Iraqi biological weapons
program, thinks that Iraq may have its fingerprints or the--
especially the letter sent to Senator Daschle, they think the
anthrax deposited there and the powder the quality used as a
base, as a substrate for putting the anthrax spores, is of such
a quality that only Iraq possesses the technology to do this.
And they think Iraqi fingerprints are in that kind of powder
used.
For my side, all I could confirm is that the micron-to-
micron size reported for the powder used in that letter is
within Iraqi capabilities because we did import this kind of
equipment when I was there from Germany and, I believe, two or
three machines at that time. So the powder technology, that's
all I could confirm at that time, powder technology is there.
How it is used by the biologists, they could manage to use it
as a base, as a carrier for the spores needed for anthrax. That
is the area for the biologist. I am not an expert in biological
weapons, and I used merely--I reported what Dr. Spurcel already
reported to Congress.
Mr. Shays. We will start out a question with Mr. Kucinich,
and I will follow him. And I apologize to Mr. Kucinich if he in
any way thinks that I do not think this is important. It is a
very serious issue, and I am happy he raised it. I didn't mean
to make light of it.
Mr. Bunn, we will go with you, and you have the floor now.
STATEMENT OF MATTHEW BUNN, SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, PROJECT
ON MANAGING THE ATOM, BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Mr. Bunn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor
to be here today to discuss what is one of the more urgent
security issues facing the United States today, and that is the
threat of nuclear terrorism.
My message today is quite simple: That I believe the danger
is real. I believe the danger is urgent, but I believe there
are things that the United States can and should be doing to
reduce that danger to a very low level, and that Congress has a
key role in doing that.
In my prepared statement I have 15 specific recommendations
for Congress. I will not burden you with more than five in my
opening remarks. Since September 11, we have been hearing over
and over again that the warnings weren't sufficiently clear to
tell us what it was we needed to do to stop the attack. Here
that is not the case. The warnings are clear, and I think the
facts are relatively stark.
We know that Osama bin Laden himself has said that he wants
nuclear weapons, that he sees getting weapons of mass
destruction as a religious duty. Al Qaeda operatives have
repeatedly attempted to buy highly enriched uranium for a
nuclear weapon. They have tried to recruit nuclear weapon
scientists to help them. The extensive materials found in
Afghanistan were evidence of al Qaeda's continuing interest.
They were primitive, I agree with Dr. Hamza, but on the other
hand, one does not necessarily leave one's best stuff in the
safe house as you flee.
We know from the physics of the situation that,
unfortunately, making a nuclear bomb while difficult is not
necessarily beyond the bounds of a large and well-organized
terrorist group such as al Qaeda. Indeed DOE's own internal
security regulations require protection against the possibility
of terrorists who might break into a DOE site, being able to
set off a nuclear explosion while they were still inside the
facility with material right at hand. We know that the amounts
required are small, and we know at the same time that plutonium
and highly enriched uranium while radioactive are not so
radioactive as to be difficult to steal and carry away or to be
easy to detect as they are crossing our borders.
We know that there is enough highly enriched uranium and
plutonium in the world today for nearly a quarter million
nuclear weapons, and it is in hundreds of buildings in scores
of countries around the world, with security at some of these
sites that is simply appalling. There are some sites that
literally have no armed guards at the door. There are sites
with no detector at the gate if someone were carrying out
plutonium or HEU in his briefcase. There are sites with no
security cameras in the area where the plutonium or highly
enriched uranium is stored.
These materials are the essential ingredients in nuclear
weapons, and they need to be secured at least as well as gold
and diamonds are. That is demonstrably not the case in the
world today.
It seems to me these facts lead inescapably to one
conclusion, and that is we need to do everything in our power
to secure nuclear weapons and the nuclear materials needed to
make them wherever they may be anywhere in the world.
By contrast, it does not make sense to me that--the notion
that Iraq would actually intentionally give a nuclear weapon or
nuclear materials to terrorists. Saddam Hussein is a fanatical
dictator. He wants to control everything. That is his nature.
The notion of giving--if he were to get a nuclear weapon or
materials after this hard-won effort, that he would give it
away to someone he couldn't control is simply not in his
nature, and particularly to a group like al Qaeda, which is
sworn to destroy the secular governments of the Arab world like
Saddam Hussein's government. The Defense Department's own
assessment of the probability of such an event is low.
Unfortunately, our current response is not as intensive as
it should, in fact, be. We have a patchwork quilt of dozens of
programs in several Cabinet departments dealing with everything
from securing nuclear materials to trying to stabilize nuclear
scientists, and many of these are making progress and deserve
strong support. But the reality is that to date only about 40
percent of the nuclear material in the former Soviet Union has
had even rapid upgrades in place, bricking over windows, piling
blocks in front of doors, this kind of thing. And comprehensive
security and accounting upgrades have been accomplished for
less than half of that. Virtually only one-seventh of Russia's
highly enriched uranium stockpile has been destroyed, and there
remain highly enriched uranium stockpiles and research reactors
all over the world that are insecure.
The President has said that keeping weapons of mass
destruction out of the hands of terrorist is his top priority,
but his program does not yet match that rhetoric. To date we
have no senior official anywhere in the U.S. Government with
full-time responsibility for leading and managing the effort to
keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of
terrorists. We have no integrated plans for that mission. The
resources devoted to that mission, the entire budget for
cooperative threat reduction, is about a third of 1 percent of
our defense budget. It is the amount we spend in a single day
on our military budget, and there is little sustained high-
level attention. As a result, these efforts are slowed by
bureaucracy, lack of coordination, and often lack of vision and
high-level attention.
So I believe that Congress has a major role to play in
correcting this situation, first, of course, in continuing this
strong bipartisan support for the relevant budgets, but also in
rigorous oversight, including hearings with independent
witnesses, such as the one today. And I respectfully recommend
a number of specific options, and let me run through them very
quickly because I am running out of time.
First, we need a single leader. I believe Congress should
mandate that the President appoint someone on a model of
Governor Ridge, who wakes up every morning thinking, what can I
do to keep nuclear weapons out of the terrorists' hands today,
who keeps this on the front burner every day.
Second, we need a global coalition. Because these materials
are in countries all over the world, the problem can only be
solved by global cooperation. I believe Congress should direct
the President to build on the June achievements at the June G-8
summit to build a global cooperative effort to secure weapons
of mass destruction everywhere.
Third, we need to accelerate our approach with Russia and
build it into a real partnership. I believe that Congress
should mandate the President to develop a fully joint strategic
plan with Russia to complete all of the upgrades for nuclear
warheads and security within 4 years at most.
Fourth, I believe that we need to expand outward globally,
and in particular with an effort to clean out the vulnerable
stockpiles like Vinca that exist around the world. I have a
memo for the defense conferees on specifically what kind of
language changes would be needed to authorize the kind of
program that is needed to clean out these vulnerable
stockpiles, wherever they may be.
At the same time, in that defense authorization conference,
I think it is crucial that the President get the flexibility to
spend Nunn-Lugar funds wherever in the world there may be
threats to the United States that need to be addressed. And I
think it is crucial that he get the permanent waiver authority
that he himself has sought so that we don't end up again, as we
have this year, delaying crucial investments in U.S. national
security over political issues related to cooperative threat
reduction.
I have a number of other points on these issues and on
reactor security and on dirty bombs in my statement, but I will
stop there having used up more time than I should, for which I
apologize.
Mr. Shays. No need to apologize. I appreciate your
testimony.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bunn follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.019
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.020
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.021
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.022
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.023
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.024
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.025
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.026
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.027
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.028
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.029
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.030
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.031
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.032
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.033
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.034
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.035
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.036
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.037
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.038
Mr. Shays. Dr. Lee.
STATEMENT OF RENSSLEAR LEE, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, FOREIGN
AFFAIRS, DEFENSE, AND TRADE DIVISION, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH
SERVICE
Mr. Lee. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Certainly a major concern of American policy since
September 11 has been the terrorists might acquire some kind of
nuclear capability and turn it against targets on American soil
and overseas. And we have heard these intimidating statements
by Osama bin Laden that acquiring weapons of mass destruction
is a religious duty and his threats to unleash such weapons in
retaliation against a U.S. attack, and these statements, of
course, have added to our overriding sense of concern.
However, a certain mystery surrounds terrorists' nuclear
procurement objectives and activities. Hard evidence of al
Qaeda's forays into the nuclear marketplace is extremely
sparse, in my opinion, suggesting that the threat of nuclear
terrorism is overstated or has not yet materialized. For
example, no terrorist connection has been discerned, at least I
do not see it, and authorities that I have talked to don't see
it, in any of the 20 confirmed cases of seizures of highly
enriched uranium or plutonium that have occurred
internationally since the early 1990's. Indeed only one
reasonably well-documented case of al Qaeda's attempting to buy
the ingredients of nuclear weapons has been recorded. This
concerned a deal to purchase what purported to be enriched
uranium of South African origin in the Sudan in 1993 or 1994.
But many people believe that this transaction was really a
hoax, and that al Qaeda's buyers were likely victimized by
Sudanese scam artists selling ordinary radioactive material
that could not be used to make a fission bomb.
I can cite some lurid media reports that bin Laden and his
crew tried to get or even succeeded in obtaining tactical
nuclear weapons from former Soviet states, but these accounts,
in my opinion, lack supporting detail or contain obvious errors
that diminish their credibility. And officially at least, no
Russian nuclear weapons are known to be missing or to have been
stolen.
Let's look at some of the other scenarios. It is not
inconceivable that terrorists could lay their hands on the
perhaps 40 to 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary
to build a crude nuclear weapon, but accomplishing this would
be no small feat for a pariah nonstate actor like al Qaeda.
This would require scouting potential suppliers, creating the
necessary official cover, gaining access to nuclear facilities,
cultivating inside collaborators, and making complex
arrangements for payment and delivery, and I think this would
be beyond the capabilities of known terrorist groups.
Now, a nation-state might find it easier to mount such an
operation; for example, Iran. Iran boasts wide-ranging contacts
with Russia in the nuclear sphere and could leverage legitimate
purchases of nuclear goods to target potential sources of
strategic nuclear material.
Also the question arises, and this has been mentioned
before in this hearing, whether the engineering challenges of
building a bomb might be beyond the capabilities of a terrorist
group. Although the fundamental principles are well known and
are described on the Internet, the devil, as they say, is in
the details. Such considerations might lead terrorists to turn
to the technically and logistically simpler path of building
chemical or biological or radiological dispersal devices, and
al Qaeda seems to have explored these various option.
Another scenario, and this also has been mentioned,
concerns the risk of secondary nuclear proliferation to
terrorists from rogue states such as Iran and Iraq. Such
states' nuclear weapons programs are ominous in their own
right, but sharing nuclear secrets obtained at great risk and
cost with outsiders, including terrorist groups, seems
unlikely. One factor is that international terrorist
organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah have
independent sources of funding and definitely have independent
political agendas and could not be trusted not to turn nuclear
weapons against their sponsors. Of course, if the state was
attacked, and if survival was at stake, it might try to use
terrorist agents as delivery vehicles for weapons of mass
destruction, but this, again, raises an entirely new set of
questions, some of them admittedly timely, I should say.
While nuclear terrorism may appear as something less than a
clear and present danger, this is not cause for complacency.
Bin Laden and other terrorists have demonstrated a clear
interest in having nuclear weapons even if their efforts to
date to secure them seem haphazard and unsophisticated.
Terrorists could learn from their mistakes, and over time they
could develop more effective procurement strategies.
On the supply side, political and economic upheavals and
the growth of religious fundamentalism may have diminished the
ability of certain nuclear armed states to monitor and control
their nuclear assets. The security problems in parts of
Russia's nuclear complex, for example, are well-documented. I
might also note, speaking of risk factors, that Russia's effort
to attract private capital investment into its formerly secret
nuclear cities as part of its nuclear downsizing and defense
conversion program could create opportunities for hostile
states and terrorists to sets up front companies in these zones
in close proximity to sources of nuclear material and
expertise.
For these reasons, protecting sources of nuclear material,
weapons and know-how may well be an important focus of
counterterrorism policy. U.S.-financed efforts are under way to
improve defenses against nuclear theft and smuggling in Russia
and other former Soviet states. Recommendations have also been
made to introduce advanced U.S. technical safeguards in
facilities in Pakistan's nuclear weapons complex, but while
progress has been recorded in our risk management efforts,
significant gaps and vulnerabilities remain.
Some observers have argued for reconfiguring U.S. nuclear
security policy to focus more on the demand side of the
proliferation equation; that is, on the machinations and
intentions of the terrorist adversaries themselves. A demand-
side strategy would presuppose a broader international
intelligence and law enforcement effort to track procurement
networks of terrorist radical states. In addition, successes in
the war on terrorism and other spheres, such as destroying
terrorists' bases and training camps, disrupting their
finances, keeping al Qaeda on the run and off balance, is
likely to reduce the risk that terrorists can acquire a nuclear
weapons capability. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much, Mr. Lee.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lee follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.039
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.040
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.041
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.042
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.043
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.044
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.045
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.046
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.047
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.048
Mr. Shays. Ms. Gottemoeller.
STATEMENT OF ROSE GOTTEMOELLER, SENIOR ASSOCIATE, CARNEGIE
ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Ms. Gottemoeller. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I agree with what has already been said this morning
regarding the threat from the former Soviet nuclear arsenals;
that is, the threat that materials could escape into terrorist
hands. I would like to concentrate in my 5 minutes this morning
on steps I believe will be important to developing an
international cooperative program with regard to this
particular, very serious problem.
But first of all, let me thank you very much and your
subcommittee members for the opportunity to testify this
morning. And I would also like to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for
the leadership role that you have played in bringing the House
and Senate together on this critical set of issues.
I would also like to state my view that of all the
countries of the world, the United States has taken this
problem the most seriously. While I agree with Mr. Bunn that we
haven't taken it seriously enough, nevertheless in the past 10
years we have spent $7.1 billion on trying to tackle this
problem, and this is a significant investment and one that has
not been matched by other countries in the world.
So I believe at this point one of the important goals of
U.S. policy should be to turn to partners around the world and
ask them to put similar levels of resources into trying to
tackle this particular problem. That is why I welcome very much
the recent agreement at the G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada,
wherein the other G-8 countries agreed to expend $10 billion on
these problems in the next 10 years, to be matched, I would
note, by $10 billion from the United States. This is an
excellent investment in the national security of all countries
around the world, the G-8 countries, of course, included.
Greater international cooperation to enhance the physical
protection of nuclear and radiological materials is the most
important additional safeguard that I would recommend to
preclude terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons. We
are already expanding the number of countries willing to invest
budgetary resources in this effort through the G-8 initiative
and other avenues, but now it is important to engage other
countries in new regions with the primary goal of ensuring the
protection of nuclear and radiological assets from terrorists.
This goal, again, is in the national interest of every country,
and where international cooperation benefits this goal, it
should be embraced and expanded.
We will have to work hard, however, to establish such
cooperation with careful attention to legal and policy issues
particularly surrounding the nonproliferation treaty and its
accompanying regimes, but I think we also need to keep before
us a keen awareness of the urgency of this threat.
Recently I have enumerated certain principles that I
believe will be important to achieving successful international
cooperation to enhance nuclear security in the counterterrorism
struggle; for example, projects I believe should be created
that will match counterterrorism priorities. Just as an
example, the United States and Russia have not particularly
concentrated on lower-level nuclear waste or radioactive source
materials in their material protection, control and accounting
programs. We have always stressed nuclear weapons, usable
material, as the highest priority, highly enriched uranium and
plutonium. There is no question however, that radiological or
dirty bombs are an attractive weapon for terrorism and have
received much publicity as such.
In this case, perhaps it is most important on an
international basis to stress projects that would immediately
address the particular problems that radiological weapons
raise. These are primarily public panic and economic costs,
including cleanup. In that case we would focus on--not so much
on the protection of radiological sources, but on incident
mitigation programs of various kinds.
I have already stressed the need for international
partnership, but I think we should look beyond simple
diplomatic efforts to develop projects that incorporate new
technologies and capabilities that are cooperatively developed.
One idea, for example, would be to build a cooperative training
program based on the U.S. radiological assistance program,
which was developed as a result of the Three Mile Island
accident, which would conduct onsite, real-time detection,
survey, modeling and analyses activities using nonsensitive
technologies. If one were able to develop an international team
fielding such capabilities, I think it would be a real asset
not only for individual countries, but, in the possible case
where we had a future nuclear terrorism threat in a broad swath
of the United States, may require more search assets than the
United States has to throw at it. It would be good for any
country facing such a threat to call on international resources
in this kind of an emergency, much as foreign relief crews are
brought to bear in large natural disasters such as earthquakes
and forest fires.
I stress that we should reinforce international arms
control and nonproliferation regimes. I mentioned the
Nonproliferation Treaty.
In closing, I would like to stress that I think we need to
go beyond a simple emphasis on nonproliferation and participate
in its health and strengthening. I think we need to have ways
of transforming adversaries that are participating in the
nonproliferation policy and turn them into partners.
I will give you a specific example of that. India and
Pakistan have taken a combative stance with regard to the
Nonproliferation Treaty, branding it a discriminatory document
in international forums and resisting policies developed on its
basis. In this context, the United States has often seen New
Delhi or Islamabad as a kind of adversary in the
nonproliferation policy. However, in the crisis that has
emerged since September 11, when terrorists are threatening to
use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and
countries around the world, every country has an interest in
ensuring such assets to not fall into terrorist hands. I
therefore believe it is important to develop joint projects to
reduce threats in a cooperative manner, as I have been
discussing. And countries such as the United States, India and
Pakistan have each amassed individual experience over the years
in protecting nuclear material and radiological sources. Such
an experience can be shared in a way that could benefit others.
If the United States, together with India and separately
with Pakistan, worked to share best practices on protection and
control of nuclear assets, the United States would be taking
the first steps toward transforming these countries from
adversaries to partners in the nonproliferation arena.
This is but one example, sir, of the way I think we need to
be thinking about working. It is much different from the way we
have worked with these countries in the past where we have, in
fact, tended to keep them at arm's length with regard to the
nonproliferation regimes, and they kept us at arm's length as
well. So it is very difficult for us to engage now, but I think
we need to think of imagining ways to accomplish this goal.
In closing, one final word, I believe it will be important
to make a case to the international community, for its
cooperation is serious and wide-ranging. For that reason, I
fully support the proposal that Senator Lugar has put forward
to expand authorities for the cooperative reduction program so
that up to $50 million of unobligated CTR funds may be used to
reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism in other regions of the
world. I think this will show our intent very strongly to the
rest of the world community and will be another step in
bringing together the world community on this important effort.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Gottemoeller follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.049
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.050
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.051
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.052
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.053
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.054
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.055
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.056
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.057
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
Mr. Paine.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER PAINE, SENIOR RESEARCHER, NATURAL
RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
Mr. Paine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Unfortunately, the
approach that's least likely to succeed from a technical
perspective are the ones that are attracting all the attention
and funding.
Mr. Shays. Would you bring your mic down a little bit.
Mr. Paine. Is that better? There's a great political head
of steam behind nuclear risk reduction strategies that
emphasize preemption, possibly involving even the preemptive
use of U.S. nuclear weapons as called for in the nuclear
posture review, and also options to increase border security.
Not nearly enough attention has been paid, in our view, to
reducing attendance of diversion-prone nuclear fuel cycles and
to better controlling or better yet eliminating nuclear weapons
materials at the source before they are produced, stolen or
diverted.
President Bush is proposing that we rely on preemptively
destroying or disrupting known terrorist groups and networks
and hostile outlawed regimes before they gain access to nuclear
weapons or explosive materials. Its sole or primary reliance on
this strategy suffers from several weaknesses. Even if the
current effort to oust Saddam Hussein is successful, there is
no guarantee of continuing success over the long term with
other such cases. Success and preemption depends on timely
knowledge of terrorist threats, which we should not be so
foolish to believe we will always have. Surely we have learned
or should have learned that much from September 11. Erroneous
intelligence could lead to misdirected preemptive attacks,
increased political hostilities and an increased risk of
further terrorism.
A focus on preemption does not hedge adequately against the
risk of societal breakdown, such as nearly occurred in Russia
in the early 1990's or a hostile regime change that could
swiftly occur within an existing sovereign state, a nuclear
weapons capable state, where a quick preventative war where
like the one President Bush is proposing against Iraq is not a
realistic policy option.
For example, a sudden hostile regime change in Japan. We
are not going to conduct a quick preemptive war against Japan.
Heavy reliance on interdiction likewise, interdiction of
illicit commerce and nuclear technology and materials to
increase homeland security is also ill advised as a long-term
strategy. Increased border inspections can foil unsophisticated
smuggling efforts, but technically adept smugglers are not
likely to be detected. Many international borders are
essentially unguarded and likely to remain so. And as the
volume and variety of international commerce continues to grow,
it will be difficult to attain and sustain a high probability
of intercepting technically competent nuclear smuggling, as we
recently demonstrated in an experiment we conducted with ABC
News.
That experiment and its public safety implications are
discussed in detail in an appendix to my prepared testimony.
And I have an expert with me today, if the committee desires to
question him, Dr. Matthew McKenzie, who is an expert on the
consequences of a small terrorist explosion, the kind of
consequences that could be inflicted upon a major city like New
York.
Mr. Chairman, too much uncertainty persists about the size
and disposition of the former Soviet stockpile, and we're not
doing enough to reduce that uncertainty. The Moscow Treaty,
signed by President Bush and President Putin, does not require
the elimination of a single nuclear warhead or nuclear warhead
component I know for over the next 10 years in Russia or the
United States. And it has no provisions, none, for identifying
or controlling the number of nonstrategic nuclear weapons,
including Russian tactical nuclear weapons.
Regrettably, the administration has demonstrated that it is
more interested in preserving a bloated U.S. nuclear weapons
stockpile currently numbering some 10,000 in tac nuclear
devices than in eliminating the proliferation and terrorist
threats represent by Russian stock of strategic and non
strategic nuclear weapons. Therefore, we believe that a much
higher priority should be attached to seeking a bilateral
agreement with Russia to verifiably account for total United
States and Russian warheads and fissile material production,
and to steadily eliminate all but a few hundred nuclear
warheads in Russia and the United States.
While there are no known Russian cases that resulted in the
theft of large quantities of weapon-usable nuclear material, at
least one incident involved the theft of three kilograms of
highly enriched uranium. And that amount in the hands of highly
skilled designers and fabricators could have produced a weapon
with the yield in the range of a 100 tons to perhaps a kiloton
of fission yield. Had the amounts involved in these separate
episodes been combined into a single explosive device, the
yield of the resulting device could have significantly exceeded
1 kiloton.
I'd like to comment on this supposed nexus between Saddam
Hussein and al Qaeda with respect to weapons of mass
destruction, because I think there's some ambiguity and
confusion in the administration's arguments. There's a history
of antagonism between Islamic jihadists and the decadent
secular Baathist regime. You will recall that Usama bin Laden
originally got his start as a terrorist because the Saudi
regime rejected his initiative to eject Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait using jihadists from Afghanistan.
Now, it seems that the only circumstance in which this
sphered nexus might conceivably occur is the very one President
Bush seems determined to create in which an egomaniacal
dictator under siege thinks he has nothing to lose and seeks to
wreak vengeance on those who are toppling him. This line of
inquiry leads one to ponder the following contradictions: The
Bush administration argues that the threat of Saddam's
unprovoked nuclear or bioweapons aggression against the United
States is sufficiently imminent to justify prompt military
intervention, but not so imminent as to justify fears of a
vengeful response by a terrorist network when his regime is on
the verge of defeat.
The only way the administration could seize upon the former
risk while discounting the latter one is if it had detailed
intelligence indicating that Saddam's regime does not yet have
the capabilities or the terrorist nexus for WMD delivery, which
it now claims are the proximate cause of our need for
preemptive self-defense. In that case, there is time for an
intrusive inspection regime to be put in place without an
immediate invasion.
In the alternative, the risk of retaliation via the weapons
of mass destruction terrorist nexus could actually be higher
than the administration is admitting publicly, in which case
the Congress ought to look very carefully at the wisdom of
giving the President a blank check to wage war against Saddam.
I do not know where the truth actually lies between these
two alternatives. But I'm not sure the administration does
either. And I find that worrisome. Either Congress and the
public have been subjected to a certain amount of
disinformation regarding imminence of the Iraqi threat, or the
administration is embarked on a bit of a gamble that could even
badly for some innocent civilians in Israel, the United States
or Western Europe.
Mr. Chairman, current international safeguards are
technically inadequate, and we go into some detail on why we
have found that to be true at NRDC. We tried to get the IAEA to
correct the significant quantity deficiency in 1995, that is
the amount of material that the IAEA regards as a threshold
amount in making a nuclear weapon. We were thwarted by the IAEA
and the State Department, which claimed that using technically
correct safeguard requirements would lead to an inefficient
allocation of the financial resources available to the IAEA. In
our view, a more logical response would be to request
additional resources to make the safeguards technically
credible.
Interdiction is a tool, Mr. Chairman, it's not a solution.
And I'd be happy to discuss with you the details of the ABC
experiment.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
Ms. Bryan.
Ms. Bryan. Mr. Chairman and Mr. Kucinich.
Mr. Shays. If you could move your mic closer to you.
STATEMENT OF DANIELLE BRYAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE PROJECT ON
GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT
Ms. Bryan. Thank you very much for inviting me to testify
today. First, I want to commend you, Mr. Chairman, for
requesting a GAO investigation of security as U.S. DOE nuclear
weapons facilities and for holding this, the first open
oversight hearing on nuclear security in several Congresses.
The Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, has spent the
last 18 months investigating the adequacy of security at U.S.
nuclear weapons production facilities, national labs and
transportation of weapons and special nuclear materials as well
as most recently the security at U.S. nuclear power plants.
POGO takes no position on nuclear power.
In early 2001 POGO began its first investigation into
nuclear security at the DOE after more than a dozen high level
departmental security experts came forward with concerns
regarding inadequate security at the Department of Energy's
nuclear weapon facilities. Just prior to September 11 last
year, POGO completed our investigation and concluded that the
Nation's 10 nuclear weapon facilities which house nearly 1,000
tons of weapons grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium and
the transportation system for weapons and nuclear materials,
regularly failed to protect this material during mock terrorist
attacks. The results of that investigation were issued in our
report U.S. nuclear weapons complex security at risk.
Because of our work on DOE nuclear weapons facilities,
several current and former guards from commercial and nuclear
power plants began contacting POGO with similar concerns about
inadequate security at the Nation's nuclear power plants
regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. POGO
then expanded our investigation and randomly contacted guards
at additional facilities. We cross-checked our interviews with
Army and Navy special forces and current and former N R C
contractors and officials. In September 2002, we issued nuclear
power plant security voices from inside the fences.
According to the interviews conducted for that report, we
found security guards at only one of four nuclear power
plants--and there are 110 reactors across the country and 65
plants--are confident their plant could defeat a terrorist
attack. The guards say morale is very low and they are
underequipped, undermanned, undertrained, and underpaid,
despite the ads many of you in Congress will have read that--
the full page ads the nuclear industry has placed showing
guards with guns and looking very tough.
I understand that this hearing is focused on the theft of
special nuclear material or theft of a nuclear weapon. If a
terrorist group were successful in stealing a U.S. nuclear
weapon, it would be extraordinarily difficult to detonate it
because of the codes and self-disabling devices designed to
frustrate an unauthorized person from triggering a detonation.
However, weapons grade material stolen from a DOE facility
could be used by a terrorist group to either fabricate a crude
nuclear weapon or create a dirty bomb. This is not as far-
fetched as some might believe.
In fact, in full scope, mock terrorist attack tests
performed by the government half the time mock terrorists are
successful in breaking in, stealing significant quantities of
special nuclear material, and leaving the site. But theft
requires that the terrorists get into a facility and get back
out again with the material. What we have found in our
investigations is that a suicidal terrorist wouldn't have to
work that hard. Instead, a successful suicidal terrorist attack
at several of our DOE weapons facilities could result in a
sizable nuclear detonation at the facility itself. A terrorist
group does not have to steal nuclear material, create a nuclear
device, transport it to the United States and detonate it in a
major city. They could simply gain access to the material at
the U.S. nuclear facility, some of which are near large
metropolitan areas, and tests have shown they can accomplish
the same outcome.
This type of homemade bomb is called an improvised nuclear
device, or IND. Such a detonation can be created by using
conventional explosives brought into the facility in a backpack
and combined with particular kinds of special nuclear materials
stored at these sites. This spring, Senator Biden held hearings
on this matter at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In addition to the possibility of an IND, there are a
number of DOE sites as well as commercial nuclear reactors
where suicidal terrorists accomplish radiological sabotage.
Again, the suicidal terrorists would only have to get into the
facility, they don't have to get out. They would simply need to
create an explosion that, while not a detonation, would
disperse radiation over a wide and, in a number of cases,
heavily populated area.
Nuclear materials at DOE sites as well as many spent fuel
poles at commercial nuclear plants are not stored inside
hardened containment. As a result, populations cannot be even
nominally protected from fallout caused by radiological
sabotage.
As you know, both the United States and Russia are awash in
excess special nuclear materials. The United States has not
only encouraged but has aided Russia in blending down their
excess highly enriched uranium and have financed the
construction of underground storage facilities, as I suspect
you were just talking about, Chairman, in Russia, for excess
nuclear materials. Yet I find it extraordinary that we do not
abide by the same standards here at home. In this country, we
have hundreds of tons of highly enriched uranium stored at Oak
Ridge, Tennessee's Y 12 plant in decaying 50 year old
buildings, some of which were wooden until recently.
We have some of the best protected underground facilities
in the world designed for storage of weapons or nuclear
materials that are not being used. Currently, much of this
excess weapons grade uranium in Tennessee, along with the
excess plutonium pits housed Pantax, which is in Amarillo,
Texas, are being stored for a war reserve.
The ill-conceived plan is to transport these old nuclear
weapons components across the country and marry them back
together during a nuclear attack in the case that we've run out
of our existing nuclear weapons.
Over 50 tons of our plutonium have already been declared
excess and could be immobilized, glassified and surrounded with
a radiation shield so that it would be less attractive for
theft. Instead of moving ahead with this plan, however, the
United States has recently decided to bet on an unproven
technology of turning this excess plutonium into reactor fuel
called MOX, which will still result in the creation of yet more
plutonium.
POGO has recommended numerous specific improvements that
should be made by both DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to significantly upgrade the security at U.S.
nuclear facilities. In a broader sense, however, the most
important improvement that should be made is to make domestic
nuclear assets less available to terrorists. At DOE, this could
be accomplished by consolidating weapons grade nuclear
materials at fewer strategic underground facilities. Another
basic improvement would be to shift the security posture from
tactics that contain terrorists inside the facilities until
outside help arrives an hour or more after the loss of the
facility to denying their access in the first place.
In the case of commercial nuclear reactors, currently the
security guards are simply required to try to hold off
terrorists and call for help from outside responders, which
tests have shown will again take between 1 and 2 hours, even
though the mock terrorist attacks have shown to be over in
between 3 and 10 minutes.
The NRC must upgrade its requirements of nuclear plants to
expect the guards onsite to be capable of preventing the
terrorists from getting into key facilities in the first place.
In conclusion, it isn't a surprise to us, and I suspect
perhaps not to members of this committee either that the
officials at the agencies responsible for allowing this
inadequate security posture refuse to face reality, and are, at
times, even hostile to improving the situation. We welcome your
oversight of these agencies. Nothing will improve without such
congressional involvement. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Bryan follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.058
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8591.059
Mr. Shays. Dr. Baram.
STATEMENT OF AMATZIA BARAM, PROFESSOR OF MIDDLE EAST HISTORY
AND HEAD OF THE JEWISH-ARAB CENTER AND MIDDLE EAST INSTITUTE
Mr. Baram. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I am
honored. On December 3, 2001, Saddam Hussein met with a group
of tribal chiefs from the southern part of Iraq. One of the
panegyrics that one of the tribal chiefs read went like this.
This was, by the way, in southern Iraqi colloquial to allow me
to translate it into colloquial English. From inside America
how five planes flew. Six thousand infidels died. Bin Laden did
not do this. The luck of the President--in square brackets
Saddam Hussein--did it. I am not a nuclear scientist nor am I
an expert on proliferation, I'm a historian and political
analyst. All I can offer you is my analysis of Saddam Hussein's
intentions and vision. And you be the judge of whether this
makes sense or not. I have been studying Saddam Hussein and his
regime for the last 22 years, so I'll try to tell you at least
what I think this means and other things.
What did he mean by that? Of course, every poem was
carefully vetted and supervised and authorized. You couldn't
read such a poem on TV. It was not live, by the way, so it
could be censured had there been a mistake. But in Iraq there
are no such mistakes.
Saddam Hussein meant three things. A, to show the Iraqi
people that he takes revenge. He always takes revenge. So don't
mess with me, I'm taking revenge of America, so certainly I'll
do it when it comes to you. Be careful.
B, to make it clear to the American people, administration
as well, but the administration as well as people, I am behind
the September 11 attack on America.
C, not to admit that he is behind the September 11 attack,
mainly to remain--to secure deniability. To prevent any
possibility that his fingerprints will show. This way America
will not have the legal right to attack him. But every single
American will know that he is behind the attack on New York and
Washington, DC. This he needs for the simple reason that he
needs to demonstrate to you his nuisance value. As long as you
don't lay off me, as long as you don't stop breathing down my
neck, I am not going to lay off you. And indeed, a few days
after the September 11 attack, the Iraqi media and the Iraqi
luminaries promised that something worse will happen if America
did not change its position, its political behavior, about a
number of things but mainly about Iraq. It took the Iraqi
regime 4 to 5 days to say for the first time we didn't do it.
And then they did. But at the same time they congratulated
those who did it.
This, by the way, is a very well tried technique by Saddam
Hussein in dealing with his domestic opponents. He perfected it
to the level of an art. When he needs to execute somebody, he
does it. He's not particularly bashful. But there are times
when he thinks it would be better not to do it and admit that
he did it or even declare that he did it, but rather to do it
in a way which will reserve for him the essence of deniability.
And this way he got a lot. In fact, sometimes his lieutenants,
his intelligence or his domestic security people would kill
somebody or would rape and then pretend--he would pretend he
meet somebody who wanted to harm, then he meet with him, him,
and say to him I heard that something terrible happened to your
family; I'm really sorry about that.
But the guy whom he would approach would suspect, would in
fact know he did it. But Saddam would say, of course I am sorry
about it and would never admit he has done it. This actually
got him all the way to the presidency in Iraq. And he thinks it
can work in the international arena as well.
In summing, I'll say--of this part, I'll say either you lay
off him completely, you just leave him alone, completely, lift
the embargo, lift the oil embargo, lift the weapons embargo,
completely leave him alone, and then you may--there is a chance
he'll have some respite, some recession, some short period that
he won't bother you at all. He'll have no reason to do that,
except revenge; but again, revenge is not an absolute thing.
Or if you decide that you need to keep the embargo on and
even if you wish to, to have a more robust embargo, more robust
weapons inspection, you have to expect the worst, and I mean
the worst.
Now, was he behind the September 11 attack on America? Of
course I don't know. There are some indications he was in touch
with al Qaeda, but this don't produce clear-cut evidence that
he was behind it. But the need is to keep you informed that he
can do you a lot of harm, and when it happens, not to admit it
but to imply that he was behind it. Never to admit it. And
never, ever to leave fingerprints.
Can he provide an Islamist terrorist organization with
weapons of mass destruction? I'll say this: First of all, many
people in America believe that Saddam Hussein is a secular
leader. Many people in America believe that Usama bin Laden and
Saddam Hussein are at daggers drawn. Nothing could be more
erroneous, nothing could be more erroneous. For your
information, Saddam, since 1990, is a born-again Muslim. He's a
very strange one. Because he drinks, his consuming alcohol,
apparently in large quantities. But for all--for public
consumption, he is a born-again Muslim. He prays five times a
day, or so he says, or so he projects the image of, and so on
and so on.
Impose Islamic punishments in Iraq never to be seen in Iraq
before like chopping off the right hand of a thief or anybody
who is regarded as a thief and beheading this is, by the way
not Islamic, beheading young women who are accused of being
prostitutes. In most part they are not. It's political. But
that's--again, that's not Islamic. But it all is presented as
Islamic as return to Islam.
About bin Laden, I advise to you read bin Laden's fatwah,
rabbinical sacoloca, Yiddish, in the Jewish tradition. From
February 1998 all I can say about it is--I have it, all I can
say about it is it sounds like it was written in Baghdad. In
Baghdad. Maybe personally by Saddam Hussein, not that it was,
but it sounds exactly like it. So there is absolutely no reason
why Saddam shouldn't trust al Qaeda with any weapons at all.
Now the question is will he? The only answer that I can
suggest is this: He will never provide--by the way Hizbollah
and Assad, Hizbollah are fundamentlistic Islamic, Assad, Assad
is really a secular present in Syria and they then cooperate
rather effectively. So that's not a reason to say this can
never happen. I'll just say that I don't believe Saddam will
ever provide any organization outside Iraq with the technology
to produce such weapons. I don't believe that. Because of the
great fluidity of Islamic politics, you can never trust these
people a year from now. But he can and he might provide them
with weapons he himself will produce, provided again and that's
to--yes, I'm summing up, provided again that his fingerprints
don't show. He needs to keep you under constant fear that he
can do you a lot of damage, so lay off me. That's all.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. I, after listening to the
very interesting presentations of all of you, I want to
apologize for not putting you in two different panels. I think
we probably should have done that. Because we have a real focus
on Iraq, then we have a focus on proliferation and how we do
that and both are very important issues. So I want to thank
each of you for your patience. And we're going to get to 10-
minute questions from each and I'm going to start with Mr.
Kucinich.
But when we try to talk about the intentions of Saddam,
it's kind of like my, you know, wondering how do you prove that
Hitler wants to go into Poland? I don't know how you get
answers to some of these questions, but let's give it a try.
Mr. Kucinich, you have the floor for 10 minutes and a
little more if you need it.
Mr. Kucinich. I want to thank the gentleman. To Dr. Hamza,
I have a map of the region here, it's primarily Iraq and it's
up on the screen. Can you tell this committee where Iraq's
nuclear sites currently are located?
Mr. Hamza. Actually that's Congressman that's not the point
right now. The point is----
Mr. Kucinich. So you cannot tell where the sites are.
Mr. Hamza. Nobody can actually.
Mr. Kucinich. OK.
Mr. Hamza. Because the sites are now mostly underground,
according to al Hidari, who defected recently and built some of
these sites.
Mr. Kucinich. You say they're underground. Do you know
where they are underground?
Mr. Hamza. They are all over the country. They are within
the civilian structure and government structure.
Mr. Kucinich. So you're saying there are nuclear sites all
over the country.
Mr. Hamza. Yes.
Mr. Kucinich. Underground. No one knows where they are.
Mr. Hamza. Nobody knows. Some above ground, some
underground, some civilian structure. That's why inspection is
a problem right now.
Mr. Kucinich. I'm certainly in agreement with the members
of this committee who favor inspections, but I'm just trying to
establish the witness says that there are nuclear sites,
they're underground and no one knows where they are. So----
Mr. Hamza. Not necessarily underground. I said some may be
underground. Some above ground.
Mr. Kucinich. Do you know where the ones above ground are?
Can you tell us?
Mr. Hamza. They are no longer where they were. Nobody knows
outside of Iraq right now exactly where the sites are located.
They are spread, fragmented and hidden. That would be an easy
job if somebody knows and can tell you right away you just go
there.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, linguistic construction is a marvelous
science. When we say that there are sites above ground, that is
a flat declarative sentence and it implies that we know where
the sites are.
Mr. Hamza. No, I said they could be. I said nobody knows.
They could be above ground, they could be underground. A recent
defector told us he built 20 underground. But that doesn't mean
that these sites are all there is. So nobody knows.
Mr. Kucinich. OK. They could be underground, they could be
above ground, nobody knows. They could exist, they may not
exist. Nobody knows. And that's why we're talking about
inspections.
Now, what's the--because as a Member of Congress my concern
is that we have proof. Proof is proof. I think the Canadian
Prime Minister said that in a couple of different languages.
And so, I'm interested if the witness has any proof as to where
they are underground, or where they are above ground, not that
there may be weapons above ground or underground.
Now, can you tell us, Dr. Hamza, what's the current status
of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, and in your answer, not
only information about fissile material everyone speaks of, but
also its tamper materials, electrical materials, explosive
materials, arming systems and the equipment to process these
into a weapon.
Mr. Hamza. What you have in the nuclear program since
already I said there is not single defector that came out of
Iraq from the core of the program. That's goes for all weapons
of mass destruction since 1995. So what you have now is what
you had before the Gulf War. Circumstantial evidence. Purchase
of equipment, some second or third tier defectors who tell us
like the al Hidari, the civil engineer, lots of indicators
including equipment purchases, intercepted purchases, activity
of certain groups.
So what we have is what have you always in a nuclear
weapon. The Indian test in 1974 there was no proof and
everybody was talking about circumstantial evidence.
Mr. Shays. If the gentleman would suspend a section. Ms.
Schakowsky may be able to get back in time, but I want you to
look at her because she's contacting you through the committee,
those of you to answer questions and we will respectfully
request that you respond to her questions in writing. She may
be back in time. OK. Thank you. I'm sorry to interrupt. The
gentleman has the floor.
Mr. Hamza. Now----
Mr. Kucinich. Let me ask you this: What kind of a weapon is
Iraq trying to build? A Hiroshima bomb? Gun type uranium
device? A Nagasaki bomb of plutonium? Implosion devices?
Thermonuclear bomb? A radiological bomb? Or all of the above?
Mr. Hamza. It's both nuclear and radiological. We already
tested as it's been explained by the inspectors who already
work there, Iraq tested a radiological bomb in 1988, but tested
in a desert, not in a building or an environment.
Mr. Kucinich. What year was that, sir?
Mr. Hamza. 1988.
Mr. Kucinich. Does it have that same facility now, does it
have that same----
Mr. Hamza. No. No. It was one test, one major test and one
small test, and the tests were non conclusive. I'm not saying
it was an effective weapon at the time. It was tested in the
desert. It was tested as a lower weapon of war and it proved to
be not as effective as it should be. But as a weapon of terror,
it's another story.
Now as for nuclear weapons, Iraq inspectors found that out
also, they had documents and everything was just revealed you
don't just have to take just my word for it. Iraq was working
and is working, I believe, on making an implosion device of the
Hiroshima type or size.
Mr. Kucinich. When was that?
Mr. Hamza. It was when I was there and it continued, I
believe.
Mr. Kucinich. Did you work on that?
Mr. Hamza. Yes, I worked on the design.
Mr. Kucinich. When were you there?
Mr. Hamza. Yes.
Mr. Kucinich. When?
Mr. Hamza. I was until 1994.
Mr. Kucinich. You were working on that in 1994. When is the
last time you were working on that?
Mr. Hamza. I worked on it last time before the Gulf War.
But I believe, according to the people, I also saw work
continued until 1994.
Mr. Kucinich. Was this a facility that inspectors later on
saw?
Mr. Hamza. Yes. It is in a field facility. Inspectors were
there. They destroyed the facility and destroyed some of the
equipment. They had what's called to them was declared to be a
smoking gun, which was a design, a workable design for a
nuclear weapon. And so the knowledge base is there, the
research done is more or less complete. What is needed is just
the fissile material.
Mr. Kucinich. To your knowledge were there ever any U.S.
companies that provided Iraq with materials or with equipment
that was used in any nuclear weapons?
Mr. Hamza. There were attempts, no, not major pieces of
equipment.
Mr. Kucinich. Anything. Bellows, for example?
Mr. Hamza. I don't know of any that the United States
itself, but the Germans did supply us with some of the
equipment we used to test and develop the nuclear weapon.
Mr. Kucinich. What was provided?
Mr. Hamza. By the United States?
Mr. Kucinich. By the German Government, you're saying.
Mr. Hamza. By German, other sources we had Japanese
sources, we had cameras that----
Mr. Kucinich. When was that?
Mr. Hamza. That was in 1989, 1989, 1990.
Mr. Kucinich. That was a time that--you know, Mr. Chairman
I'll be presenting some documents to this committee that will
show that according to information provided through----
Mr. Hamza. I was not here. I don't know.
Mr. Kucinich [continuing]. State Department that the U.S.
companies involved in sending over certain materials to Iraq to
assist them in the development of this program. Now we know
they were destroyed. And I would take it, based on your
testimony, that you're willing to agree that even the programs
that you worked on were destroyed. Nevertheless, I think it's
valuable to have you here to talk about what it was like before
they were destroyed.
The only other thing I want to do, Mr. Chairman, is to,
just for the purposes when we began this, I have some of Mr.
Hamza's statements that are verbatim transcripts of CNN October
22, 2001, that establish his position on some of these issues
that have come up here.
I want to tell Mr. Hamza I'm glad you came before this
committee, but at the same time, I think it's very important
that none of your experiences, which is valid, it's your
experience, be interpreted by the media today as being proof of
the current existence in Iraq of usable weapons of mass
destruction of the ability to deliver those weapons, you know.
That's my concern. I'm not going to discount your proof when
you worked for Iraq's weapons program. I'm sure that what you
know about that program is marvelous.
But I'm equally sure, based on the intelligence that I've
heard from my country's Intelligence Agency, the Central
Intelligence Agency, that Iraq does not currently have usable
weapons of mass destruction. And that's what I have to go on.
So while I appreciate----
Mr. Hamza. You mean nuclear or otherwise?
Mr. Kucinich. Dr. Hamza, please. I'm saying that I'm taking
my position based on information I received from my Central
Intelligence Agency. So, thank you for being here. And I'm
going to ask the Chair if he would be so kind as to include in
the record these statements from CNN, as well as an article
where we always have to be cautious in these hearings about
information that's brought forward in a climate which is
potentially inflammatory.
And because a few years ago Congress was presented with
information about the Iraqi government being involved in troops
storming hospitals, stealing incubators and leaving babies to
die on the floor. It turned out that incident which was brought
to inflame the American public was not true. I'd like to submit
that into the record too. These hearings are always very
interesting. I want to thank the Chair.
Mr. Shays. Thank the gentleman.
Mr. Tierney.
Mr. Tierney. I'll follow you.
Mr. Shays. OK. I'm going to make a statement. I want to
know if any of you disagree with it. We know that Saddam
Hussein had a chemical, biological and nuclear program before
the Gulf War. Anybody disagree with that? We know he had one, a
chemical biological and nuclear program after the war. Do any
of you disagree with that? And we know that he kicked out
inspectors when we started to destroy his programs of chemical,
biological and nuclear program. Do any of you disagree with
that?
Should the burden of proof be put on the individuals who
believe that he doesn't have a program to say that he--after he
kicked us out he stopped the chemical, biological programs or
should the burden of proof be put on individuals to say that he
continued it? I'd like to ask each of you where you fall down
on that one. I'm going to go right down the row. Dr. Hamza.
Mr. Hamza. Actually in that circumstantial evidence case of
this type, where a country has had a long history a proven
history of working in this area, the only way really to be on
the safe side is for Iraq to admit and allow full access to its
various areas of research.
Mr. Shays. Let me just repeat the question again. None of
you disagreed with my statement that he had a chemical
biological nuclear program before the war, that he had one
after the war, and that he kicked us out when we started--the
inspectors out when we started to dismantle his chemical,
biological and nuclear program.
The question I have, and I want to ask each of you, and
it's not a long answer, do you believe the burden of proof
should be on those to prove that he is still continuing the
program or should the burden of proof be on those to prove that
he has stopped these programs?
Mr. Hamza. I believe those who believe he has stopped.
Mr. Shays. OK.
Mr. Bunn.
Mr. Bunn. It seems clear to me that he has continued those
programs. I'd be amazed if, for some reason, he had stopped and
I would be surprised if anybody would succeed in proving that
he had stopped after the inspectors had left.
Mr. Shays. Dr. Lee.
Mr. Lee. I have to give a kind of ambiguous answer but I
think that there are--it certainly is very difficult to prove a
negative. On the other hand, I think that full deployment
mobilization of our intelligence capabilities including
inspectors can certainly come to some appropriate answers, they
can give us grounds for making decisions.
Mr. Shays. I'm going to come back to you.
Ms. Gottemoeller. I was about--Mr. Chairman, I was about
also to say, as Dr. Lee just did, that it's well near
impossible to prove a negative. I do believe that it is
possible through the idea of a coercive inspection regime to
not only make some significant determinations about what is
currently in place in Iraq with regard to weapons of mass
destruction programs, but also to proceed in the direction of
disarmament, of disarming those programs. I think we have been
overly focused on inspections per se, but it's inspection
moving toward disarmament that we need to concentrate on.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Paine.
Mr. Paine. My view, and I think NRDC's view, the burden of
proof is squarely on the shoulders of the Iraqi government to
comply with the U.N. resolutions including intrusive, very
intrusive inspections until the Security Council is satisfied,
not until the Iraqi government is satisfied that it has
demonstrated its bona fides, but until the international
community is----
Mr. Shays. You gave an answer you wanted to give and I
appreciate it, but I do want to ask where the burden of proof
lie with those if he had it before, he had it after, and he
kicked us out while we destroyed it, where does the burden lie?
Does the burden lie with the American government to prove that
he has continued this program, or does the burden of proof lie
with those to demonstrate that he has stopped doing these
weapons of mass destruction?
Mr. Paine. Who should demonstrate that he has stopped?
Mr. Shays. The American government. Should the people who
oppose intervention have to demonstrate that he has stopped the
program? Where does the burden of proof lie here?
Mr. Paine. I guess I'm having trouble answering the
question because I think there is a third option, which is to
be agnostic on that question and to leave the result of that
determination to a thorough going international inspection. My
answer to the question is I don't know and the burden of proof
is on Hussein regime to comply with the international
inspections. That's the best I can do.
Mr. Shays. All right. I can't tell you how to answer a
question.
Ms. Bryan. Mr. Chairman, I feel the question is outside the
scope of our work and I don't feel qualified to answer it.
Mr. Shays. OK. You have some very fine expertise but I
understand your response. Dr. Baram.
Mr. Baram. Saddam stopped inspection for a reason.
According to the Security Council resolutions, the burden of
the proof is on Iraq that it no longer has weapons of mass
destruction. I would stick with that.
Mr. Shays. OK. Do you believe, Dr. Lee, that he has
continued his programs?
Mr. Lee. Congressman, I really don't have a requisite body
or access to intelligence information to allow me to----
Mr. Shays. And you need intelligence to be able to answer
that question?
Mr. Lee. Well, I would certainly hope that having absorbed
the lessons of September 11 and these horrendous catastrophic
experiences that we are beginning to understand again the
importance of intelligence as a tool for anticipating threats
against the United States, including threats from----
Mr. Shays. I would totally agree with that. I don't how
that quite fits into the question whether you believe he has it
or not. If you choose not to answer it, that's another issue.
Do you believe he has weapons of chemical biological nuclear
program?
Mr. Lee. I'm afraid I have to come down as an agnostic on
this issue.
Mr. Shays. You have no belief. You're totally neutral on
the issue of whether you think he has it or not?
Mr. Lee. Congressman, I don't feel that I have the
requisite information to make even a judgment on this.
Mr. Shays. Ms. Gottemoeller.
Ms. Gottemoeller. Sir, I have read the various open
literature that's out there, including the International
Institute for Strategic Studies dossier that you referred to in
your opening remarks. On the basis of what I have seen from
very knowledgeable people, including the inspectors who have
been working in Iraq over the years, I do believe that there is
an ongoing active program, particularly in the arena of
chemical and biological weapons, where we know that we did not
proceed to the point of essentially dismantling those programs.
In the case of nuclear weapons, I think we were very close
to actually shutting down that program, certainly we had
disrupted it at the time that the inspectors were thrown out.
But nevertheless, I would believe that after inspectors were
thrown out, every attempt would have been made by the regime to
restart that nuclear weapons program as well.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Mr. Paine.
Mr. Paine. Sir?
Mr. Shays. Do you believe that he has continued chemical,
biological and nuclear programs?
Mr. Paine. From open source literature, yes. From what I
read in open sources, there's obviously some continuing efforts
going on in Iraq. But when you say continue--if the question is
asked with the view on the basis of that information should
then the United States launch preemptive attack----
Mr. Shays. We'll get to it. Let me just say we're going to
have lots of passes here.
Mr. Paine. Yes, certainly what's available in all the media
and open source would lead a disinterested observer to conclude
that he has continued these programs.
Mr. Shays. Dr. Lee, is there anything, any reason why you
would think he would have stopped if he had a program before
the war and after the war, and he kicked us out as we started
to destroy his programs, is there anything that leads you to
believe that he would have logically stopped?
Mr. Lee. Well, I think that the disincentive for him to
having continued weapons of mass destruction programs is the
fear of being caught, of being found out, and the consequent
risk of international retaliation of some kind, including the
kind of retaliation that is being contemplated apparently----
Mr. Shays. Do you think that was logical before September
11? Do you think he had any big fear before September 11? This
is a country that doesn't respond when our soldiers were bombed
in Germany. We didn't respond to the Hizbollah and Syria and
Iraq and Iran when they mutilated 300 Marines. We didn't
respond when our soldiers were blown up twice in Saudi Arabia.
We didn't respond really in any effective way when our
embassies were blown up, and we didn't respond when the Cole
was hit. Why would he fear for a minute that the United States
is going to respond? What logic tells you that?
Mr. Lee. Well, I think that he would simply have to
evaluate the behavior of each administration and try to assess
the determination, resolve of the United States to, in fact,
take action to try to stop his weapons of mass destruction
program.
Mr. Shays. Let me just say to you, I'm just trying to get
to a point where we can have that debate. If we can get beyond
the issue of he had it before, he had it after, and he kicked
us out while we were destroying it and I think pretty much we
can, then it doesn't mean that we should go into Iraq, but it
does mean that it would be interesting to know the intentions.
I think it's fair, for instance, to ask would he logically give
it to terrorists? And you know, then, Dr. Baram, I'd be turning
more to you to have you sort that out for me.
I think it's logical to then say is it easy to get, if we
do believe as I think most do, Dr. Hamza, that he has the
weapon, he just doesn't have the material for the fuel in a
sense, then we get in a logical discussion on how easy is it
going to be for him to get it. So, you know, these are the
things I logically want to isolate. But there's no doubt in my
mind he had it before, he had it after and he kicked us out
when we started to destroy it.
So I make a very easy assumption he's continuing the
program. That part I get to. Now I have some really other
hurdles to get by to know if we should go into Iraq, but I'm
pretty along the way there.
Mr. Tierney.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. I'm sorry.
Mr. Tierney. I'm going to take you in a different
direction----
Mr. Shays. Let me just say, Dr. Baram, you made a request
that you be excused. Can you make--do you have like 5 minutes
in case----
Mr. Baram. Yeah, sure, 5 minutes.
Mr. Tierney. I'm fine.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. You're going to be giving a
lecture. I appreciate you being here.
Mr. Baram. Can I just answer your question briefly?
Mr. Shays. Umm, well I did ask----
Mr. Baram. This is the same question you addressed to
others.
Mr. Shays. Yes, you may. You may do that.
Mr. Baram. First of all, I'm sure most people or everybody
here read Scott Ritter's book which he wrote after he already
resigned from his position. Even though his views today on Iraq
has nothing, have a look at his book, there is a very
frightening list of things which he and inspectors believed
Iraq still had when they left in 1997, 1998. So yes, he still
has those things. Further, even more importantly, I think
Saddam is assembling his nuclear scientists once every 3 or 4
weeks in front of the TV. And he's telling them--by the way, he
has never dispersed them. They were always together since 1990,
about 18,000 people led by some scientists.
Mr. Shays. How many thousand?
Mr. Baram. 18,000, one-eight. 18,000 people are still
assembled in one place you might call it. He has never
dispersed them. Nuclear. Not just scientists of course,
technicians and engineers and----
Mr. Shays. Let me just say if you answer this question, my
colleagues want to keep you here to pursue this, you're not
leaving. So whatever you say you need to be able--they need to
be able to respond to you. So if you want to down a route just
know they may have questions to ask you.
Mr. Baram. Well, I don't know what to do. I'll just say one
thing. I can show TV footage in which he's addressing his
nuclear scientists and he's telling them to defend the Nation.
Now, that's a military option and not nuclear science for its
own. So what I'm saying he is he's trying to impress with the
fact that he is developing nuclear weapons in order to deter
you from----
Mr. Shays. Let me just see if there's a followup before
you're allowed to leave.
Mr. Kucinich. I ask unanimous consent to read a paragraph
from an article in the----
Mr. Shays. Sure. You have the floor.
Mr. Kucinich. With Mr. Tierney's permission. This is from
the September 18, 2002 Independent from the United Kingdom, an
article by Robert Fisk. You mentioned Scott Ritter. He says
Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis turned savior was indeed as
an inspector regularly traveling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli
intelligence. Then Saddam accused the U.N. inspectors of
working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it
emerged, was using the U.N.'s Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's
government communications.
And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the
United States and Britain launched operation Desert Fox, it
turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had
been visited by U.N. inspectors over the previous 6 months. Far
from being an inspector at the U.N. labs though, they didn't
all know it had been acting as forward air controllers drawing
up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with
U.N. resolutions.
I want to just read that into the record because while I'm
for inspections, sometimes inspections get curiouser and
curiouser.
Mr. Shays. OK. Thank you. Appreciate you being here. Mr.
Tierney, you have the time.
Mr. Tierney. Just want to followup for a second. There's a
number of different areas that I'd like to touch upon. But
following for a second this question of whether or not Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction, I'm assuming that nobody disagrees
with the prospect that, you know, the international community
is the one that put resolutions in place calling for the
inspections and that it would be wise for the international
community to enforce those resolutions to in fact continue the
inspections. Is there anybody that disagrees with that?
And I would suspect--seeing nobody does, I would suspect
that's the best way we're going to find out to what extent he
may still have any of those programs going and what our
concerns are. But whether it's Iraq or Iran or some terrorist
group, Mr. Paine, Ms. Gottemoeller, anybody else who may want
to comment, what are the countries most likely to be in line to
give materials or to provide materials that could be used for
nuclear weapons of any nature to any terrorist group or in Iran
or Libya or Syria or anybody else?
Mr. Paine. Well, Rose can comment further, but the country
of greatest concern in the last decade has been Russia. And
it's not that the government itself would give, would give
openly or clandestinely the materials that it would be stolen
or sneaked out of Russia in some form. So there's a kind of
defusion or leakage that we're concerned about from Russia that
may have already occurred. This material may be floating around
on the black market, and at some point it may wind up in
Baghdad. That is sort of the general concern, that there is a
global black market in nuclear materials.
Mr. Tierney. That would be wherever it's going to end up.
What I'm trying to do is focus on where the starting point
would be for any materials that could end up eventually causing
harm. You're telling me the primary source would be Russia?
Mr. Paine. At this time, we believe it to be Russia, but I
want to emphasize that the weaknesses of the international
safeguard system are such that material could be taken from
research reactors, highly enriched uranium fuel. It could be--
--
Mr. Tierney. Where would we find those?
Mr. Paine. All over the world sir. There are many countries
put there at behest of the detente--atoms for peace program in
some cases. And there are other bulk handling facilities that
process plutonium for fuel in reactors. It's very difficult to
safeguard those against continuing small losses that could
amount to very significant quantities of material taken over a
period of time. And so, that's a weakness in the international
safeguard system that we're concerned about and that is an
inherent problem with bulk handling facilities that handle
nuclear explosive materials, like highly enriched uranium or
plutonium.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
Thank you. I will ask Ms. Gottemoeller.
Ms. Gottemoeller. If I may add to what Mr. Paine has said,
I think we have two problems to confront here, Congressman.
First of all, we have what was produced for the Soviet weapons
program, which was a massive amount of material. We believe
that approximately 1,500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium
were produced for the Soviet weapons program and approximately
150 metric tons of plutonium. And so there is an enormous
amount of material in the Russian Federation, that is where we
worry about the Russian Federation, compared to any other
country in the world. Only the United States came anywhere
close to producing that amount of weapons-usable material. And
all security melted down in the breakup of the Soviet Union in
1992. So that is why we worry about the Russian Federation and
the other states in that region.
Second, however, around the world there are spread a very
large number of facilities. Mr. Paine made reference to the
Atoms for Peace program wherein highly enriched uranium went to
research reactors in Africa and other continents. But the
Russians have their own version of that program, the Soviets,
and there are Soviet-built research reactors also spread around
Eastern Europe particularly, as well as other states of the
former Soviet Union. So it is a problem also of small amounts
of material being spread in a very large number of countries,
some of which are very ill protected.
Mr. Lee. Congressman, I just wanted to mention, there are a
lot of fissile materials stored outside of weapons in the
Soviet Union, something like 600 tons, according to estimates
by the Energy Department. And also, it is believed that
terrorists are interested in buying nuclear material possibly
to make a weapon, and maybe within the nuclear complex of
Russia and other states there are disenchanted, underemployed
scientists who might be willing to sell this material. But the
problem for terrorists is gaining access to these facilities.
This is a problem that is a formidable challenge for any pariah
terrorist group of the likes of al Qaeda, not to mention
Hezbollah, Hamas, any other group. They are the ultimate
outsiders. They are not going to be invited to visit these
nuclear facilities. Delegations of al Qaeda, Hamas don't tour
the former Soviet Union.
So it is really a question of whether you are going to see
the potential sellers and the potential buyers ever being able
to make this critical connection.
Mr. Tierney. So you are saying it is not as immediate a
problem as Mr. Paine and Ms. Gottemoeller seem to think it is.
Mr. Lee. I don't think it is a clear and present danger,
no.
Mr. Bunn. Let me go back in the opposite direction for you.
First of all, it is important for the committee to understand
that today there are no global binding standards for how well
nuclear material should be secured. This is left up to the
individual decisions of every country. And yet nuclear material
anywhere that's insecure is a threat to us, and so we need to
be working as quickly as we can to make sure that the least
secure material in the world is brought up to some kind of
reasonable standards. And a lot of this material is very
insecure.
I agree with Dr. Lee that it is going to be hard for al
Qaeda to be wandering aimlessly around in the former Soviet
Union without being detected, but that is not necessarily the
way they would have to get their material. There are many
facilities around the world that would be trivially easy for a
terrorist group to simply attack without making connections
with insiders or what have you. Or there is--an option is if an
insider has succeeded in stealing material, which is most of
what we've seen in cases--in the real cases in the former
Soviet Union so far, he might be organized enough to figure out
how to make contact with a real buyer. Most of what we have
seen has not been organized crime, but what I like to call
comically disorganized crime, people who have no clue how to
make contact with a buyer. But we shouldn't rest our national
security on the notion that will be true forever.
Mr. Tierney. Given those comments, whatever happens in
Iraq, those situations will still exist. There are still people
out there that we feel are going to be interested in getting
those materials to be at least prepared to do bad things,
whether they will use it for leverage or for their own security
or whether to go after other people.
So we have two areas. We have one where it is the weapons-
grade material in the Soviet Union, and we have to have a
strategy or plan of what we are going to do to diminish that
availability; am I right? And we have some programs in effect;
we are not funding them appropriately. We probably need to
expand them. In what ways would each of you move toward putting
that problem back in the box, that aspect of the weapons-grade
material in the Soviet Union?
Ms. Gottemoeller. Mr. Tierney, if I may, I will perhaps
begin. I think, frankly, we have the right suite of programs
now, enhancing the physical protection of weapons-usable
material on warheads, I believe. Those are particularly
valuable and important programs. We need to be emphasizing
accelerating completion of those programs. And Mr. Bunn made
reference to this as well: That will require additional
funding.
But I believe that we really do have our priorities right
in many ways, but the funding has been inadequate. I think the
G-8 initiative, 10 plus 10 over 10, where G-8 countries will be
spending $1 billion a year and the United States will be
spending $1 billion a year, those are the right kinds of
numbers. I think we can expend those resources in a very
valuable way in accelerating the protection of nuclear
material.
If I may just make one further point on Dr. Lee's comments.
My experience working inside the government in both the White
House and the Department of Energy in the previous
administration leads me to comment that we did, in fact, make
several decisions about programs based on our knowledge at the
time that there were individuals of concern operating in the
area of Kazakhstan, for example. You may remember the so-called
Project Sapphire from 1994 when we removed highly enriched
uranium from Ust-Kamenogorsk in Kazakhstan and brought it to
the United Stated for eventual blend-down and sale as reactor
material. Our urgency in carrying through that project was
partially based on the fact that we understood there were
operatives in the area that were interested in that material,
and this is all part of the public record. Certainly the media
at the time made much of this fact. Thank you.
Mr. Bunn. Can I jump in on the answer to that question?
Mr. Tierney. Apparent you can. I have more time.
Mr. Bunn. Certainly resources are important. At the moment
our efforts to secure nuclear warheads and materials are not
primarily resource-constrained. They are primarily policy- and
leadership-constrained. As I mentioned, we need a single leader
for the efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the
hands of terrorists. We need an integrated plan. And in Russia
in particular we need a more partnership-based approach.
We have over and over again designed our programs in
Washington for securing Russia's nuclear materials without
asking the Russians how they wanted it done. If we are going to
get it done quickly in a way that it will stay done, that will
get the Russian buy-in that is so crucial for sustaining
security for the long haul, we need to work in a more
partnership-based approach, and that is described in my
testimony.
If you look at the warhead situation, there is, to my mind,
a scandal in that there is today equipment that was purchased
by the Department of Defense 5 years ago for fixing urgent
security vulnerabilities at Russian nuclear warhead storage
sites that is sitting in warehouses uninstalled because
disagreements between the U.S. Department of Defense and the
Russian Ministry of Defense over exactly how much access the
United States would be granted at these sites has been allowed
to drag on and on. Then when that disagreement was finally
resolved this past spring, the Bush administration decided not
to certify Russia's compliance with the non-Lugar conditions
and put additional months of delay in the path of getting these
warheads secured. That is the kind of thing, in my judgment,
that wouldn't happen if we had a Tom Ridge-like figure pushing
these things forward every day.
And finally, I should emphasize again it is not just a
former Soviet Union problem. These kinds of stockpiles exist
all over the world, and that is why it is so crucial that the
language in the defense authorization bill on the Senate side
authorizing the expenditure of funds to address security
vulnerabilities that may be outside the former Soviet Union be
approved by the conferees.
Mr. Tierney. I guess that is the second part. The first
part I was focusing on were the problems in the Soviet Union
and what programs we have in place, and I think you made a good
point, and we need some leadership.
And I would expand on the Tom Ridge-like thing. I would
give more authority than Mr. Ridge seems to be getting. He is a
marvelous man, but I wish that he had been given a little more
authority and been able to do a lot more. You need somebody
with the leadership and the assignment to focus on that and
then the resources to utilize what we have in place there.
The next step, of course, is to look at those other non-
former Soviet Union and Russian problems where it might
originate, where it might be the source of this.
Mr. Bunn, I think we need to talk about the need for an
international agreement, something unfortunately this
administration seems abhorrent of. We would need international
cooperation to try and raise the bar and establish the
standards that we will tie into, and what would that look like.
You all might want to comment on that.
Mr. Bunn. For years I have been advocating an amendment to
the physical protection convention to create stringent
standards for security of nuclear material. I have given up.
The negotiations on that amendment are under way, and it will
be an amendment that will have a very modest step forward. What
we need instead is to focus on political commitments at the
highest levels, and I think that we can build on the
President's success at the G-8 summit in June in establishing
this global partnership against the spread of materials and
weapons of mass destruction to build a system in which each of
the participants in that partnership agree to secure their own
materials to high standards, and then to provide assistance to
any other state that is willing to commit politically to those
same standards. I think that is much more promising than formal
treaty negotiations in this particular area.
I would say, though, that one of the concerns that I have
is borne out by this hearing today, and that is that when a
momentous decision like whether to go to war is under way, it
tends to drive out the leadership time and attention available
for other matters.
Mr. Tierney. It also drives out some of the press, I
notice. If you look at the broader problem, it will be deeper
over time.
Mr. Bunn. Indeed. To build the kind of fast-paced program
to secure these nuclear materials around the world is going to
take a lot of high-level political heavy lifting, and I am very
concerned that if we are spending the next couple of years
focused on war with Iraq, that kind of leadership attention is
not going to be available.
Mr. Paine. The first rule is do no harm in your own home.
This administration is pushing some misguided programs that are
actually increasing the risk of nuclear terrorism, and I would
like to just point those out. Sometimes the right hand does not
know what the left hand is doing. Incredibly Vice President
Cheney's Energy Task Force sought to encourage plutonium
research and use, for example, by promoting an advanced form of
reprocessing of spent fuel in the development of advanced
plutonium breeder reactors. The Department of Energy right now
is encouraging joint research with MINATOM, that is the Russian
nuclear energy agency, on advanced nuclear fuel cycles and
breeder reactor concepts that are based on reprocessing nuclear
spent fuel and extracting the plutonium and fabricating fresh
plutonium fuel. These programs are likely to encourage
nonweapon states to develop similar research efforts, including
the development and operation of nuclear hot cells and nuclear
fuel processing facilities, and the training of cadres of
experts in plutonium metallurgy.
Even closer to home, the House energy bill, H.R. 4, section
515, seeks to establish a new Office of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Research. That sounds innocuous, but then you look at what the
provision says. The provision would require DOE to conduct
research on advanced processing and separations, that is
plutonium separations, and the recycling and disposal of spent
nuclear and high-level radioactive waste, including the
participation of international collaborators in research
efforts, and even requiring them to provide funding, and I am
quoting now, provide funding to a collaborator that brings
unique capabilities not available in the United States, if the
country in which the collaborator is located is unable to
provide for their support.
Mr. Tierney. Let me push that into English for you. You are
telling me that in the administration's H.R. 4, a bill that
went through the House, there is a provision----
Mr. Paine. They are pushing international plutonium
research.
Mr. Tierney. So essentially any other country that would
set up a similar statute or similar rule to abide by in their
own country could say that they were doing this on an innocent
basis, and they have nothing to do with weapons, and they are
doing the same kind of research the United States is doing.
Mr. Paine. Yes. The dilemma is we have established since
the Atoms for Peace program a tolerance for programs in other
countries, not the United States. Historically since the Ford
administration, this country has rejected the commercial use of
plutonium in our nuclear energy system, and we used to actively
discourage that use in other countries.
Over the years that policy of actively discouraging other
nations has eroded, and now we find the Bush administration
basically getting back on board the old Atomic Energy
Commission agenda of separating plutonium and recycling it as
the ideal form of nuclear energy. And they have just put out a
huge report on what they call their Generation 4 Road Map for
the Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, which includes
collaborative research with foreign countries and collaborative
deployment, in essence, of plutonium breeder reactors.
Mr. Tierney. So on the one hand we are trying to put it
back in the box, and on the other hand we are letting it out.
Mr. Paine. The international safeguard system is not
equipped to deal with these facilities that currently operate
in this area. If anything, the current safeguards, as we show
in our prepared testimony, need to be upgraded. The quantities
that are safeguarded need to be smaller. We are recommending an
eightfold reduction in the significant quantity because these
small diverted quantities can be combined into a weapon.
Mr. Shays. I would like to pursue in my next round some of
the questions Mr. Tierney had, but I want to go in some kind of
progression here. I think it is clear we had it before the Gulf
War, and we had it after. And when the inspectors were kicked
out, I think it is very clear he continued. I am willing to
make that assumption without much concern that I have to
demonstrate it because I think logic just dictates it.
But I want it then go, Dr. Hamza, you were involved in the
nuclear program until when?
Mr. Hamza. I was involved in capacity until 1990; after
that in training and consultancy up to 1994.
Mr. Shays. So you weren't running the program in 1994 when
you----
Mr. Hamza. No. I was a consultant to the program.
Mr. Shays. Did you get fired? Were you not doing a good
job?
Mr. Hamza. No. It is part of--1990 is part of
reconfiguration that more or less toned down the work into a
smaller unit, and the major figures in the program were sent
somewhere else. In case the inspectors found out, they will be
shown they were teaching or doing something else.
Mr. Burton. This was after the war.
Mr. Hamza. Yes, this is after the war.
Mr. Shays. And that is obviously when the inspections
start.
Mr. Hamza. Keep us out of the way of the inspectors.
Mr. Shays. It is your statement under oath that you believe
he basically just needs the nuclear, the highly enriched
uranium or plutonium in that core, and then he has a weapon? Is
that your----
Mr. Hamza. Yes. That is the inspectors' concerns also by
the way.
Mr. Shays. That is basically a 6-month timetable, in other
words, from getting that plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
Mr. Hamza. That is the International Institute of Strategic
Research concerns also and the inspectors' concerns also, not
just mine.
Mr. Shays. So the real issue, then, is how do you get that
fuel?
Mr. Hamza. Yes.
Mr. Shays. I say the nuclear core. When we talk grams,
kilograms, a gram is the size of a what, a pill?
Mr. Hamza. No.
Mr. Shays. A kilogram would be the size of a brick.
Mr. Hamza. No, very small. Uranium is one of the heaviest
materials.
Mr. Shays. Would--the kilogram would be the size of a
switch?
Mr. Hamza. Probably a kilogram would be less than half of
one-third of this cup here.
Mr. Bunn. Enough HEU for a bomb is more or less the size of
a softball if it is in the metal form, and it is the kind of
bomb that Dr. Hamza was working on designing, an implosion
bomb.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Bunn, it is highly radioactive?
Mr. Bunn. One of the dirty little secrets is it is not very
radioactive. If you sprinkled highly enriched uranium on your
corn flakes and ate it in the morning, your main problem would
be the heavy metal toxicity more than the radioactive toxicity.
And you can put highly enriched uranium in your pocket and walk
off with it and not have a serious problem. It is unfortunate
that this material while radioactive is not radioactive enough
to make it hard to steal, to make it hard to work with, or to
make it hard to smuggle into our country.
Mr. Shays. So it does not have to be encased in this
incredibly large container?
Mr. Bunn. No.
Mr. Shays. Does anyone disagree with that?
Mr. Hamza. The Chinese machined it by hand, it is so low in
radioactivity. The earlier Chinese nuclear weapon program, they
machined it by hand to the shape required.
Mr. Shays. Obviously the bomb itself, some bombs could take
this softball-size plutonium or highly enriched uranium and
create one type of size explosion, and others could create
another size. In other words, can the same material create
different sizes of explosion based on the sophistication of the
weapon?
Mr. Bunn. Yes. It depends in particular on the speed of the
explosives and the symmetry of the explosive.
Mr. Shays. Tell me how many softballs we have out in the
world rather than telling me how many tons.
Mr. Bunn. There is enough nuclear material in the world for
almost a quarter million nuclear weapons.
Mr. Shays. So we are basically saying a quarter of a
million softballs are out there.
Mr. Bunn. Correct.
Mr. Shays. Would you speak to what Ms. Bryan spoke about--I
think you did--we know we have been able to get into our
facilities. Getting out is another question. But as Ms. Bryan
points out, getting in is nine-tenths of the story. It can be
100 percent of the story. I have never known that you could
actually create a nuclear explosion in a plant with nuclear
weapon-grade material. And maybe I did not hear Ms. Bryan
right, and maybe I should come back.
Ms. Bryan. You heard me right.
Mr. Shays. Would that be a dirty bomb, or would it actually
be an explosion?
Ms. Bryan. No, it would actually be a nuclear detonation. I
don't mean to step on Mr. Bunn. I actually, just in case you
asked, brought the writing of Louis Alvarez, who is a Nobel
Prize-winning physicist who wrote specifically about this
question. With modern weapon-grade uranium, the background
neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such
material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield
explosion simply by dropping one-half of the material onto the
other half. Most people seem unaware that if separated, U235 is
at hand, it is a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion.
This is not a dirty bomb, this is actual detonation. Whereas if
only plutonium is available, making it explode is the most
difficult technical job I know. Given a supply of U235,
however, even a high school kid could make a bomb in short
order.
Mr. Shays. Does it have to be a specific kind of
conventional bomb that ignites or causes the nuclear explosion?
Ms. Bryan. I do not have clearance, so I do not know
exactly how it is done.
Mr. Shays. This is what is confusing me, and I am exposing
my ignorance, and I will then let others jump in. What is
confusing me is I thought you always had to make a nuclear bomb
in order to have a nuclear bomb explosion. And now what you are
saying before this committee, and obviously it is well known,
but I did not know it, you can basically cause a nuclear
explosion.
We will start with Mr. Lee, Mr. Paine, Mr. Bunn.
Mr. Lee. I will give you again an ambiguous answer on this.
There is a wide variety of opinions in the unclassified
literature about how easy it is to make a nuclear weapon, and
there is a point of view that an average high school person,
competent high school graduate, would be able, given sufficient
nuclear fissile material, enriched uranium, say, to make a
nuclear bomb.
On the other hand, many other people say that, look, it
took the United States and the Soviet Union many years of
development to come to the point where they could actually
fashion one of these devices. And I suspect that, not knowing
much about the technical side of things, I have a Ph.D., but
not in nuclear physics or science, that this is a complex
technical task. It would require for a terrorist to assemble
some people with hands-on knowledge of how to make a bomb, and
there is no evidence that I have seen that any terrorist group
has been able to do this.
In the case of Iraq, however, I would certainly agree that,
yes, they had these people in place before the Gulf War, and
they still are in Iraq.
Mr. Shays. Let me go to Mr. Paine first and then Mr. Bunn
and then Ms. Bryan.
Mr. Paine. Yes, it obviously matters what you are trying to
do and what you are working with. If you are working with two
halves of a sphere of highly enriched uranium, as we do
routinely in our laboratories, and you bring them together
slowly, you will start--because they are half of a critical
mass, you bring them together, you will start a chain reaction.
And as that chain reaction proceeds, it will heat up the
material, cause it to expand, and the chain reaction stop. If
you assemble those two things with sufficient velocity, there
isn't a chance for the material to heat up and disassemble,
and, therefore, it explodes in a very fast chain reaction.
So the question is can terrorists, if they got into a
facility, find two halves or, in the case of a Hiroshima bomb,
a projectile arrangement, a projectile uranium going into a
kind of anvil of highly enriched uranium, and that is how they
assembled the two pieces. And you have to assemble them with
the sufficient velocity, and you will get a nuclear explosion.
Mr. Shays. The question I am wondering is with a
conventional explosion, do you create that effect that you just
talked about?
Mr. Paine. With a conventional explosion?
Mr. Shays. Next to this.
Mr. Paine. You would need a way of propelling one slug of
uranium into another slug or assembling the halves in some way.
The way a bomb designer does it is with a surrounding sphere of
high explosives.
Mr. Shays. I will come back to you, Ms. Bryan.
Dr. Hamza.
Mr. Hamza. The Iraqi program does include in its early
stages when it was set up to go for the gun type, so-called
what has been described here gun-type nuclear weapon. The South
African program relied on this design to make its nuclear
weapon program, and they did it in very short order with very
little staffing and no testing.
The advantages of this type of weapon is that you need very
little testing to do it. It does not require very high use of
sophistication in explosives. You can do it with much simpler
explosions than the implosion device type. The disadvantage is
you need much more nuclear fissile material, and in Iraq that
is a problem. That is why it was worked on earlier and dropped
later, and I believe probably Iraq is going back to it now
because it requires much less testing, and it is much more
assured of working than the implosion device type.
The South African experience also presents another angle.
The device needs two intiators, a so-called neutron initiator.
To get the two things together you need to fuse them, start the
nuclear reaction with a neutron initiator. It is so slow that
the natural radiation will take care of that. So in this case
Iraq now has a problem in this area, too. So possibly this is
one angle also to be looked at by the inspector is that Iraq
has no initiator and is not a problem with this kind of design.
And the South African, usually when you make a design, a
nuclear weapon, to produce it on a larger scale you need
assurance that it works because of the large investment in time
and cost. With this type of device, the South Africans, without
testing, felt so assured that they went ahead and produced more
of this weapon, I believe five or eight some number in between.
So this is another possibility.
Also this is an ideal terrorist weapon because what you
need is simple explosive, so you can probably obtain them
locally. All you need is to transport the actual uranium
pieces, and machining is not a problem for uranium, as I
mentioned earlier. You could assemble it here in an apartment
actually by a terrorist and use some simple explosive to slam
them together.
Mr. Shays. At every hearing I learn new things, but my mind
is working a mile a minute here for obvious reasons. You are
really answering two questions when I asked one. But I want to,
before Ms. Schakowsky gets the floor--and she will have
practically as much time as she wants here--I want to know--and
I appreciate all the answers, but I want to know can someone
literally stack a bunch of logs, but in this case it is highly
radioactive material, put a bomb in it, and you blow up and
cause a nuclear explosion? That is the impression I get from
Ms. Bryan's comment.
Mr. Bunn. Can I clarify that? You will not get a nuclear
explosion if you drop a stick of dynamite onto a pile of highly
enriched uranium. What Chris and what Danielle and what Dr.
Hamza have been describing is taking a couple pieces of highly
enriched uranium. For example, in a cannon barrel, which is
basically what the Hiroshima bomb was--the Hiroshima bomb had
basically a cannon shell made out of highly enriched uranium
fired into something that had a cannon-shaped hole in it made
out of highly enriched uranium, and when the two pieces came
together, that was the bomb. And that is relatively
straightforward to do.
If all you want is what a terrorist would likely want,
there is a huge difference that is important to understand
between what a nation-state is going to want in terms of
reliability, safety, confidence that it is going to go off and
what a terrorist group is going to want. If a terrorist group--
if there is only a 50/50 chance they are going to be able to
level Midtown Manhattan, that is pretty good from their
perspective.
Mr. Shays. If you happen to be a suicide bomber and it
doesn't go off, you just keep working at it because no one
necessarily knows you are doing it. Besides this basically
softball-sized material not giving--being something you can
actually physically handle, does it send a signal that
stretches a half a mile away?
Mr. Bunn. No, unfortunately not. Again, the radioactive
emissions from highly enriched uranium are extremely weak. Just
the other day I was speaking with the scientist who had done
the testing for the International Atomic Energy Association
detection technologies for controlling borders, and I said, you
know, these little pages that the Customs guys are always
showing on TV that they can wear on their belt while they are
searching the bag, if there was HEU in the bag, what is the
probability that one of those pages would go off? And he said,
zero.
Mr. Shays. This is very interesting stuff.
Mr. Bunn. There is other technology that is more effective
to detect the material, but HEU is difficult to detect.
Mr. Shays. Does anybody disagree with what is being said
now?
Ms. Bryan. I just wanted to----
Mr. Shays. Let me preface why I am asking. I got the
impression from your statement that may not be as accurate, and
that is a group of totally uneducated folks, but willing to
risk going up in smoke, could take over one of our facilities
and with this highly enriched uranium or plutonium cause a
nuclear explosion. I am hearing you still need a bomb, and yet
the impression I got from you is you do not need a bomb. So
maybe you could please clarify that.
Ms. Bryan. Right. I think that is two things, if I heard
what you are saying. The first is I don't think you're assuming
totally uneducated people. People would have to know what to
look for to find uranium. But our understanding is the way that
the mock terrorists have been able to do it at the DOE
facilities is they bring conventional explosives in backpacks,
get into the facility, and use that conventional explosive to
create the velocity that was being discussed of slamming the
two pieces of uranium together.
But what was the second question you were just asking?
Mr. Shays. Would that be accurate from your standpoint, Mr.
Bunn or Mr. Lee or Mr. Paine?
Mr. Bunn. Of course they don't actually set off the bomb
when they break into a DOE facility. They are assessed to have
had enough time to do that.
Ms. Bryan. Of course.
Mr. Paine. The Russians had an atomic demolition munition
that could be transported by two people. It was essentially two
parts, and they slammed one piece into another piece, and they
essentially used the ground as the temper, as a way of stopping
the flying piece. So that was a pretty simple concept they had.
Mr. Shays. It raises this point, and then, Ms. Schakowsky,
I am going to you. It raises the issue for me, I traveled with
a former Senator and Senator Lugar to Russia, as I mentioned,
and we look at chemical, biological and nuclear storage sites,
and I believe those two gentlemen deserve the Nobel Peace Prize
because it took my breath away.
You see a million shelves of chemicals which we are now
destroying. Each one can destroy 20,000. You see 50,000 people
devoted to making biological agents. You visit just two of
their biological sites, and you see viruses stored in
refrigerators with string around it and wax so they can see if
someone got in.
And then you go and see this site, this unbelievable site
of storage, Mayak, that is in 40 hectares, but this one
gigantic complex of 500 feet long and 150 feet wide, cylinder--
metal cylinder openings that go down 18 feet to store just a
portion of their highly enriched nuclear weapon-grade material,
and you think, God save this world. And now, as you describe
here, I am thinking we have to be a little more sophisticated
than we have been.
So, yeah, I am pretty concerned about Iraq, but I am
getting a little more concerned about the potential of just
some modestly educated people causing some serious problems
with nuclear weapons. Biological and chemical, there are
antidotes. Nuclear, I do not know how you protect once there is
a nuclear explosion. I do not know how you provide the antidote
for it.
She left.
Mr. Tierney. Ms. Bryan, there are in my district alone a
number of communities that live within close proximity to a
nuclear power plant. They have various groups of citizens who
are obviously concerned about their safety and concerned about
some act of terrorism putting their families at risk. Are their
concerns justified?
Ms. Bryan. Yes, they are.
Mr. Tierney. I understand you have interviewed a number of
people involved in security at different plants. Will you tell
me a little bit about what you have learned from those
interviews?
Ms. Bryan. Yes. What we have found that since September 11,
the guards are currently working 6 days a week, 12-hour shifts.
So they are working 72 hours a week. So the first thing you are
losing is any ability to frankly be awake or prepared for any
such attack.
We found when we began our investigation that in a number
of facilities the guards were only given pistols and shotguns,
and in the last few months they have started to get
semiautomatic weapons in some of the facilities. But many of
the guards, in fact nearly all of the guards, voiced specific
concern that they are clearly going to be outgunned by any
terrorist who has weapons that are very available on the open
market, grenades, grenade launchers. They are totally unable to
protect a facility against that.
Their training is extraordinarily low. They are given the
ability to practice with their weapons for 2 to 3 hours a year.
So the familiarity with the weapons they are given, as
inadequate they are, they are not sure in the heat of a panic
they would really know how to use the weapons anyway.
And then we found, and I described in my testimony, the
simple fact that no one has really until in the last 3 months
thought about the fact that the utilities--remember, these are
commercial facilities, these are not government facilities. The
utilities are only required to have enough guards available to
alert essentially the outside, to slow things down and alert
the outside.
Then the tests that have taken place in the past 3 months,
tabletop tests, this is the first time ever where the
government thought how long would it take for the SWAT team to
get there to get the terrorists out. They are finding in
tabletop tests, which I suspect are likely to be generous, it
takes between 1 to 2 hours, and there is a chasm of time there
where no one is doing anything.
Mr. Tierney. I have heard about these tabletop tests, and
my understanding is that is what is primarily being done now.
They are running through these scenarios on tabletop exercises
as opposed to real-life exercises.
Ms. Bryan. That is exactly right.
Mr. Tierney. Is that what you find in most or all plants at
this time?
Ms. Bryan. Well, they stopped all mock terrorist tests
since September 11, but prior to that they were occurring only
once every 8 years at each facility. And we found is--because
there is such a gigantic lag, and, of course, the facility was
given months of notice when they were going to be tested, that
they would beef up the security. They actually bring
consultants in to get them ready, to get training. They would
be told in advance what kind of test was likely to come. They
were only protecting--this has been reported in open documents
in a number of places--against three outside attackers with one
inside helper. And even in those cases the facilities with all
of that prior knowledge, with additional forces, they were
still failing those tests half the time.
Mr. Tierney. These are commercial facilities hiring private
guards and training them or preparing them to some NRC
Regulatory Commission standards, so obviously those standards
needs to be reviewed.
Ms. Bryan. Well, they actually don't have--there are no
real standards imposed by the NRC on the quality of training.
It really has been left up to the utilities subcontracted out
companies--primarily Wackenhut actually.
Mr. Tierney. Say that again.
Ms. Bryan. Wackenhut, which is a commercial security
company. And they are the ones who set the standards. There are
not real standards currently for training. They are working on
fatigue rules, for example, nuclear operators at the power
plants, but they don't have fatigue rules for the guards.
Mr. Tierney. So we have private concerns hiring private
police officers without any Federal standard for what they have
to do to be manned and what they have to do to be trained for
that, and without what kind of equipment they have, how much
time they have to have learning that equipment, and we have
testing procedures that are basically on top of a table as
opposed to real-life scenarios.
Ms. Bryan. In this case it is definitely a bottom-line
issue where security costs money, and it doesn't help them
produce electricity, so they do as little as they possibly can.
Mr. Tierney. Mr. Paine. If I read H.R. 4, the
administration's dream scenario on this would be to have more
nuclear facilities built in the future and to prolong the life
of existing ones.
Mr. Paine. Yes, but the question involves the type of
facility. One, I think, can have an incredible perspective on
nonproliferation and stopping nuclear terrorism with the
current nuclear deployment that we have. Light water reactors
are reasonably safeguardable, but the administration is
proposing that we return to closing the fuel cycle and
deploying breeder reactors in plutonium separation plants,
sometimes in the same facility, and training a whole new
generation in plutonium metallurgy and in the chemical
extraction of plutonium. If this occurs not only in this
country but globally, we are compounding to a rather
considerable degree the whole problem of proliferation and, by
extension, nuclear terrorism.
So these facilities are hard to protect and have a spin-off
of technological expertise that will find its way into illicit
channels.
Mr. Tierney. I guess it goes without saying that we still
haven't found what to do with spent fuel at this point in time
except leave it onsite and try to protect it as best we can.
Ms. Bryan, what are we doing about that? What is the best
protection we could have, and what is the level of protection
we do have in most plants right now for spent fuel?
Ms. Bryan. You are certainly aware there is a great
controversy about what to do with spent fuel. Currently the
most important thing we see in the short term is to move to dry
cast underground at the facilities while addressing the bigger
question of what to do with nuclear spent fuel more generally.
There hasn't been a real push, so it is lying in these pools
which are, I said, in many cases uncontained.
Mr. Tierney. One question on the Iraq situation. Mr.
Chairman, I appreciate you having these hearings. I found much
of the testimony on Iraq to be very speculative today on that,
which I am not sure is entirely helpful to getting people
focused on what we ought to do in terms of United Nations's
activity and things of that nature. But does anybody here have
any expertise or any information about what throw capacity Iraq
may have in terms of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons?
How far could they project any weapon that would cause
destruction? Because I think obviously we are focusing on one
end of it, but I think an important end of it is to realize
that there is limited capacity, to my knowledge, for Iraq to
actually get any type of a weapon from one point to another.
The question I have is is there anybody on the panel here who
would have direct evidence that Iraq has made a threat to the
United States directly to use any of these weapons unprovoked?
Ms. Gottemoeller. Mr. Tierney, if I may, although I am not
a huge expert on the Iraq missile or the Iraqi Air Force, it is
my understanding that in terms of their reach, they can
threaten Israel, our important ally in the Middle East, but
they cannot field an intercontinental attack capability.
Certainly they have no intercontinental ballistic missile
capability at this time, although there is a concern that in
future years they could acquire such a capability. But at the
current time they would be forced back on the same kind of
mechanism that perhaps a terrorist would employ; that is,
sneaking a nuclear weapon into the United States and detonating
it on our territory in that way rather than a more
sophisticated weapons delivery technique.
Mr. Tierney. Are you aware of any official threats for Iraq
to do just that, to somehow instigate a sneak attack on the
United States in that way?
Ms. Gottemoeller. I cannot rule that out, but I am not
aware of evidence of such plans, but I cannot certainly rule it
out.
Mr. Tierney. We cannot rule it out from Iran, Syria, Libya
or anyplace, right?
Ms. Gottemoeller. Correct.
Mr. Tierney. Provoked. However, Mr. Paine, you raised some
interesting points on your testimony that even somebody not
inclined in an unprovoked manner to used weapons that might
react differently once provoked. Would you go over that a bit
more?
Mr. Paine. I was pointing out what I believe to be a
serious flaw or contradiction in the administration's
presentation of the issue. I do not know what the facts are,
but the way it has been presented publicly is that Saddam
Hussein simultaneously represents an imminent threat to our
security which must be preemptively attacked, but he is not
such a threat that while we are doing that couldn't execute a
devastating response somewhere in Europe or elsewhere in the
Middle East or in the United States. In other words, they
create a nexus between terrorist organizations and Iraq to
justify the invasions, but then the nexus disappears when it
comes to assessing the risk of the invasion.
So I think that needs to be looked at more closely. And if
you consider that this nexus does not yet exist, that it is a
hypothetical, it is a serious hypothetical, but we have no
evidence that it currently exists, then there is time for the
international inspection system to work, or at least there is
time for us to try to make it work and resort to violence later
rather than sooner. On the other hand, if you think the nexus
currently exists, then the stakes of an invasion are quite
high, because if that nexus does exist, then he could undertake
retaliation. He may have a contingency plan for such
retaliation now as we speak.
I think Members of Congress need to huddle with the
Intelligence Community and with senior administration
decisionmakers and look more--a little more closely at this
question of whether, in fact, the public justification that has
been presented for the attack is the real one, because if it
is, then it is a high-risk scenario. The way I resolve this
contradiction is that basically the administration is engaging
in overspeak and exaggeration, and it wants to take advantage
of the current war on terrorism and the kind of martial
atmosphere in the United States and around the globe to take
out an old enemy, namely Iraq, and that may be a supportable
goal, but it is a different kind of argument.
Mr. Bunn. Can I jump in and support Chris on that point in
the sense that let's leave aside nuclear. For the moment Saddam
Hussein--the chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff testified
yesterday he does not have a nuclear bomb as far as we know,
isn't going to get one for some years unless he gets the
fissile material from abroad. But he has had chemical and
biological weapons for well over a decade, and he has hated the
United States for at least that long, and al Qaeda has been
around hating the United States and wanting to attack the
United States and attacking the United States for that long. If
he was going to give chemical and biological weapons to al
Qaeda, wouldn't he have done that? Now all of the sudden after
a decade after the Gulf War, he is suddenly an imminent threat
to the security of United States of America. It may very well
become an imminent threat to the security of the United States
of America if we convince Saddam he has nothing left to lose,
which seems what we are bent on doing.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
Mr. Hamza. Can I comment on this?
Mr. Shays. Fire away.
Mr. Hamza. If Saddam already have the deterrence in terms
of chemical and biological weapons to prevent the United States
from attacking for fear he might unleash some of it, then he
already won. Then he already won the war because this is
exactly what he wants.
I do not think he is going to attack the United States
unprovoked in this sense, especially in a nuclear area, but
that does not mean if he feels safe he will terrorize the
region and play the bully in the region, and that is the main
goal. Is the United States ready to allow him to control the
Middle East through his terror tactics and his other weapons of
mass destruction?
The other choice, if we are already deterred, if the United
States is already deterred, then what is going on in the future
when he does get nuclear weapons, how is it going to get worse?
How will the situation develop if the United States is already
deterred by just the chemical and biological? How much would it
be deterred by the nuclear when he has it, and how safe would
he feel when he has it?
The idea is to look down the road what would happen.
Mr. Tierney. If I could, in fact, he's been deterred. He's
had this biological and chemical weaponry since the 1991
effort, and he didn't use it then because he was deterred in
consideration of what the ramifications of that were going to
be, and that is what has been somewhat temporarily stabilizing
the area. Now you are talking about going in and totally
destabilizing it, not leaving him with any negotiable point
out; not saying, we want weapons inspections, and unless you
have really high-level weapons inspections that are enforced
and open-ended, we are going to do something. You are saying
whether or not you do that, we will have regime change, which I
think many people interpret, and probably rightfully so, we're
going to kill you. At what point does he say, what do I have to
gain from this exercise? I am going to fire every bullet in my
gun.
Mr. Hamza. Who is deterred? The United States wouldn't go
after him because he has them?
Mr. Tierney. I do not think that is the question. The
United States has to have a reason to go after him that is
justifiable in international law.
Mr. Hamza. He already invaded two neighbors. He already had
two major wars in the region, the largest wars in the region of
the last century. What more evidence do you want of his
aggressiveness and bad intentions?
Mr. Tierney. The United States supported him against Iran.
Mr. Hamza. For a period when Iraq was going to collapse,
yes, they supported him because they didn't want an extension
of the Islamic Republic, and we supported him for that, too,
for that matter. We were there.
Mr. Shays. I cannot wait to jump in, but Mr. Paine.
Mr. Paine. Just this point. It is a very important point
for the kind of thing we are talking about now. Is the United
States really as appalled and repelled by Saddam as we pretend
to be? I mean, from 1982 to 1988, we had a clandestine program
to assist Iraq. The CIA was providing overhead imagery. Sixty
Defense Intelligence Agency officers were providing detailed
battle plans, detailed intelligence on Iranian troop positions.
The Iraqis were using chemical weapons against Iranian forces
with the knowledge of the United States, and we did not object.
This went on for 2 years until they retook the Fao Peninsula.
So he may be a monster, but in the previous decade he was
our monster, and then suddenly he became someone else's
monster.
I think the record of the U.S. Government on it--excuse me,
I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. No, no. I want you to continue.
Mr. Paine. The record of the U.S. Government over this, if
viewed over a period of decades, does not lend a conviction
that the United States cares greatly and sincerely about the
monster Saddam Hussein. He was a brutal monster in 1980. I
personally favored in the Gulf War the United States
continuing. I was alone among my liberal friends in that view,
but I wanted him out because I had been a correspondent in the
Middle East, and I knew how bad he was. I want him out now, but
the risks of action and inaction, whether nuclear chemical or
biological, have to be honestly discussed.
There is a kind of demagogic approach to this that the
administration is taking in which their public arguments don't
add up. If the private argument is he doesn't have these
weapons of mass destruction, therefore we felt entitled to
attack him, we don't feel deterred now, it is not safe to
attack him, then let's just say that. Let's just say that.
Let's just say that I think the right administration
approach would be to go to the Hague and fill out an indictment
against this guy for crimes against humanity, and the list is
very long, and over a period of time, in conjunction with
coercive inspections, try to get the guy arrested.
Mr. Shays. I will jump in, if I might.
Mr. Paine. At some point with international support the
Iraqi people will turn against him.
Mr. Shays. I happen to agree with you that the truth needs
to be told, whatever the truth is. And I also happen to believe
that when we started doing our work on whether our troops were
exposed to chemicals, and our own government said they weren't
exposed to offensive use of chemicals, and they inserted that
word ``offensive,'' we didn't know until we had a witness come
with actually videotape of blowing up Khamisiyah, and we saw
warheads, chemical warheads. And we had witnesses who came
before our committee who testified under oath that they saw
U.S.-stamped--suggestions of U.S.-stamped chemical containers.
And we had the Department of Defense argue to us that our
troops weren't exposed. And when all the gadgetry that our
soldiers were wearing went off, they said it was because these
were not calibrated, they were very sensitive, but the really
highly sensitive people--equipment didn't show this. And then
we had two military personnel whose expertise was using highly
sensitive equipment. They were encased in the vehicles, that
they were protected, and they swore under oath that they came
across chemical exposure. And I happen to believe in my own
mind that we were not eager to have people know about our
involvement with Iraq earlier.
So I am going to say even if I agree with your point, which
I happen to, that we were involved with a pretty despicable
person, because he was at war with a country that held our
government employees hostage for 444 days, we sometimes choose
our friends by who their enemies are.
But that notwithstanding, I would argue that tells us we
even have better knowledge. The sad thing is we were involved
with this person, and we helped create him, and there is a lot
of embarrassment to this. But embarrassment to me is no longer
the issue. It shouldn't have been earlier. So I will just say
that to you.
But having said that to you, I do agree with Dr. Hamza. In
my dialogs with my constituents, it is 40 to 1 against in the
letters and so on. They say, if we do this, he will do
something terrible to us. And then I am saying, my God, he's
already won. He's already won, and he doesn't even yet have
nuclear weapons.
I don't know that I would want to be faced with a
biological or chemical attack. I wouldn't, but I do know that
we still have some ways to deal with it. I do not know how we
deal with the nuclear. And so I will just kind of just make a
few more points.
Dr. Hamza, you believe, and I think most people do, that if
he gets the plutonium or uranium, he's already got the weapons.
He has a weapon that will work. One of the things I am
interested in is your opening comment. One bomb or two bombs is
one thing; 10 or 20 or 30 is another. And then the question, I
wonder, is, OK, once he has a nuclear weapon, do we then say,
OK, now we can't?
And so there's got to be a time-sensitive issue here. And
so I then begin to say, my God, do I want him to have one
nuclear weapon? No. But I clearly don't want him to have 20 or
30. And I do think that he demonstrates something unique. He
used it against the Iranians. We knew about it. He used it
against his own people.
Mr. Paine. We assisted it, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. I will say we knew about it. I do not have any
evidence that we assisted. Maybe silence is assistance. But the
second point is we know he used it against his own people.
And I do like the analogy that Dr. Baram used. He said that
sometimes he doesn't admit that he uses things, but he does,
and he has the benefit of denial. I think it is foolish for
anyone to accept right now that he said--Iraq has come before
us and said they have no chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons. We know he has chemical and biological. We know it.
And the other thing is, and I do get into this, and it is
the one area that the administration has shared with people
that is sensitive, and that is his delivery systems for certain
weapons. Suffice it to say we know that he has delivery systems
that others don't know he has. It is alarming for me that he
has delivery systems, not necessarily nuclear. But I guess what
I am wrestling with is when. But I am agreeing with your point
about the truth.
Mr. Paine. On this very point, Iraq is one egregious case.
Iraq is one egregious case, but how about the next egregious
case: Syria.
Mr. Shays. That is an easy answer for me, if that is your
question.
Mr. Paine. Is this a future principle of foreign policy, or
is this a one-op operation?
Mr. Shays. I believe without question that the policy that
we had during the cold war made sense. It was reactive. It was
containment, reactive, mutually assured destruction.
Anybody that suggests that it's going to be reactive, wait
until they do it, containment, mutually assured destruction I
think that's just out of the line of--no, I'm just going to
make my point. I think it is preemptive.
We don't have the ability to prevent things from happening,
but we may have the ability to prevent them from getting
started. So when people get nervous about preemptive, I think
it's my duty to get my constituents to understand, whether or
not they agree, we should go into Iraq. It is preemptive now,
and that's the world we're in; it is preemptive.
And then you say to me, what countries. We saw a change in
the behavior of Yemen. Yemen was with the terrorists; they're
now helping us fight the terrorists, because they believe we
have a new policy that is sincere. They saw--I listed the
places we didn't respond to. They believe that we will respond.
They believe that they get onto our boat, we're serious. They
are helping us.
I believe that if people see what happens in Iraq--I think
Libya thinks twice. I don't think that Libya becomes the
problem. I ultimately think then it's containment of Iran.
Mr. Tierney. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. Shays. Yes.
Mr. Tierney. I understand what you're saying, and I think
you make some points, but I think you overstate it a little bit
when you talk about mutually assured destruction not working
any longer has gone away.
You know, mutually assured destruction between countries
has not gone anywhere. That's still very much a philosophy and
a policy that works and is in place and hasn't been disrupted
at all.
What has happened is that terrorists have shown that they
are not deterred, and that's a whole different question, what
do we do to make sure that we preempt terrorist acts, and that
means we have to have international cooperation with a whole
range of countries, some that have historically been our allies
and some that have not been; and then we have to question, if
that's the case, what happens to those relationships and
partnerships and everything if we disrupt an area that affects
that.
But I don't think there's been any showing at all that
deterrence hasn't worked between sovereign nations. And that
seems to be a fairly regular thing there. And I don't, you
know--and I don't know where you would make the case out that
it has. I think the terrorist acts that have happened are a
separate question, and we obviously need to go about that.
That's what I thought we were doing in Afghanistan.
That's what I thought we were doing since Afghanistan,
although now there's some question about whether we're moving
our focus off of that and going in on Iraq and a whole range of
issues.
The last point on that: I have probably been privy to all
the classified hearings that you have on delivery systems, and
you know, I don't see--I don't think the United States is even
marginally threatened by a delivery system from Iraq. And I
think it would be----
Mr. Shays. I don't think--I'm not even suggesting that. I
do want to put in the record that we're talking about
intercontinental ballistic, other delivery systems that are
more regional. The--we are--and I'm saying this, and then I'm
happy to have you respond because I know three of you want to
jump in here.
I do believe this has to be social, political, economic,
diplomatic as well as military. I totally believe in that, and
I believe in it even more after hearing this testimony, but I
didn't need to be convinced.
I do know--I do know that--so I do know this battle is
going to be social, political, economic, diplomatic, as well as
militarily fought. The challenge I have is that I buy into the
argument that Iraq has relationships with terrorist
organizations. Abu Nidal was the most horrific terrorist who
had a bedroom in Baghdad. And some can call that suicide. Maybe
it was. I call it destroying the evidence. So the relationships
that exist among Muslim nations and Islamic terrorists, to me
is pretty clear.
So my concern is that he will use--that you won't see a
signature item of a ballistic missile.
Let me let you guys jump in.
Mr. Paine. I have difficulty trying to take the arguments
that have been made in favor of preemption in Iraq and
generalizing them into a general foreign policy, which the
President has just done with his national security strategy.
And I think----
Mr. Shays. Can I back up a second? Not just with Iraq.
Preemption became--we had to know the threat, we had to develop
the strategy--and we had to develop that strategy. Preemption
became paramount in Afghanistan. That was preemptive.
Mr. Paine. I think it was reactive. We were attacked and
then we attacked Afghanistan.
Mr. Shays. But we are trying to preempt the possibility of
these training camps causing any more problems.
Mr. Paine. Right. But I think we had a casus belli under
international law in that case.
I just have a difficulty if the idea is that we are going
to deprive other countries of chemical and biological and
nuclear deterrence preemptively. They haven't threatened us
concretely, they have not attacked us, but nevertheless we feel
uncomfortable about their possession of these weapons, and
we're going to attack them. And we're going to attack them
preemptively in the future?
Mr. Shays. I don't put Iraq in the same category as I put
Holland.
Mr. Paine. No, but how about Libya, Syria, Sudan? I mean,
I'm just uncomfortable with Iraq as the opening gun of a
policy.
Mr. Shays. I said Holland. I was just being cute, yeah.
Mr. Paine. I just want to say that Libya was the first
country to submit a warrant for Usama bin Laden's arrest.
Mr. Shays. This is where I reacted. If we start treating
these as a crime, we'll never 100 years from now--they can't be
crimes. They've got to be acts of war.
Mr. Paine. But that was like back in 1997.
Mr. Shays. What is 1997?
Mr. Paine. The United States didn't--I mean----
Mr. Shays. I don't believe that for a minute I would accept
that the attack on the Twin Towers was a criminal act; I
believe it was an act of war. I believe terrorist acts are acts
of war, and they're not crimes. That's what I believe.
Mr. Paine. I'm just trying to point out that there is a
class of countries that the President himself has identified as
the ``Axis of Evil''; two-thirds it are still outstanding, even
if we take out Iraq. Are we going to do the same thing to Iran
or the same thing to North Korea?
Mr. Shays. If they don't change their behavior, we would
have to.
Mr. Tierney. I think the other valid point, if I could:
What if you take that theory, and other countries decide that
they're as entitled to act as the United States, so that India
decides that Pakistan is a bit of a nuisance and tries to
preempt something there; and Russia, Chechnya; and China,
Taiwan, and right on down the line.
Ms. Gottemoeller. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to make the
point that we have had a preemptive strategy with regard to
proliferation problems for well over a decade. It was known as
counterproliferation. It was employed many times by the Clinton
administration. Even prior to the Clinton administration, the
Israeli attack on the Osiraq reactor in Iraq was a very good
example of a counterproliferation preemptive strategy.
The President's new national security strategy underscores
the need to continue with counterproliferation type preemptive
attacks. He also makes note--and I welcome this fact--of the
need to employ nonproliferation diplomacy, the continuation of
the nonproliferation regime, which I thought was very welcome
from this administration; and also to emphasize cooperative
threat reduction and efforts to get at the problem at its
source, as has been the case, I would say, on and off in this
administration.
So, again, I welcome the fact that the national security
strategy places emphasis on each of those things:
counterproliferation, preemptive strategies on continued
diplomacy and on threat reduction.
However, I agree with Mr. Paine that, unfortunately, the
emphasis rhetorically of this administration has been on
preemption overall, and it's giving a very bad impression that
this will be the kind of strategy of choice for our military
doctrine in upcoming years. And I think that is very negative
indeed.
Mr. Shays. I think I agree with you, but I want to qualify
first. Are you saying that it's--we are making preemption the
centerpiece without diplomacy, without economic efforts and so
on?
I don't know what you just said.
Ms. Gottemoeller. Yes, sir, that is indeed exactly what I
believe. I believe they are highlighting preemption at the cost
of these other tools that should be available to them and which
indeed in their security strategy they mention as also being
important. But it's like an aside; it's not something that they
tend to emphasize.
Mr. Shays. I want to go on record, I agree with you. I
agree with you. And I think it's a very costly thing. Thank you
for making that point.
Dr. Lee.
Mr. Lee. Yeah, I can certainly----
Mr. Shays. I want to know are you going to be on the fence
on this or are you going to be----
Mr. Lee. No, you have to understand where I'm coming from,
Congress.
Mr. Shays. Are you going to assert yourself and take a risk
here?
Mr. Lee. No. My comment is, if we can find on Khidhir
Hamza's map locations of chemical, biological, nuclear
facilities, whatever, I can see why some people might believe
that there could be an argument for taking these out.
On the other hand, where I really have trouble, I think, is
the assumption that if the--you have seven countries that are
designated by the State Department as state sponsors of
terrorism. All of them are said to be working on or in some
stage of development of weapons of mass destruction. I mean,
even Cuba is said to have some minuscule biological capability.
Where I find it is--even though these countries may have some
relationship with terrorists, harboring them, giving them
political support, aid, financing in some cases transfers of
conventional weaponry, as in case of Iran transferring to the
Palestinian Authority and to other groups, I find it very
difficult to believe that a state with these kinds of weaponry
will feel comfortable providing terrorist groups with the means
of mass destruction which could be used, in turn, eventually
against the state itself under certain circumstances--except in
the possible circumstance when that state's survival is
threatened, in which case, really all bets could be off.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. And I hope you weren't offended by my
just having a little fun with you. Because that's very
insightful.
Mr. Lee. I'm having fun, too.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. If--there's a danger in how long
these hearings last; I have to be careful.
Dr. Hamza, did you want to make a point?
Mr. Hamza. What we have, a system----
Mr. Shays. Your mic is not on.
Mr. Hamza. We have a system of international inspection
that's been, what, something like 50 years now, in the 50's,
the International Atomic Energy Agency; and there are other
regimes for control of chemical. And I don't know if there is
any in the biological area; I don't think there is one yet.
What happened is, what happens when you violate this, and
what do you do? Iraq did violate this International Atomic
Energy Agency Nonproliferation Treaty. There are other
countries which are labeled in the Axis of Evil, which include
Iran and North Korea, all parties to this treaty.
Now, there is a very clear violation by Iraq. It's
declared, admitted, documented, checked out on a larger scale,
a violation of this treaty.
Now, Iraq did submit for a while to inspection and allowed
destruction of some of its facilities, then reverted back to
its old ways by more or less stopping the inspection process.
By the way, it was stopped when the inspectors demanded the
scientists; when they came close, they started to get the
scientists to talk, one of them ended up in jail--the chief
scientist of the biological weapons program when he came too
close to the inspectors and probably--and actually asked for
asylum, Dr. Nasir Hindawi.
So when the inspection process became realistically in the
last years, 1996 up to 1998, and the inspectors started to
demand actual information from the actual scientists, without
the minders, possibly; and the process of minders, started
naming names and asking for people to come, Iraq more or less
stopped the process.
Now, if there is no retribution for that, what would the
other countries say? What would the other terrorist, so-called,
states say? Now, the idea is not that every time you are going
to war. The idea is, the violator, the main, major violator, if
it is let go, what would the other do? These are rational
actors; not everybody is crazy there. These are--they look,
examine and make their own decisions. And if there is no
action, that decision would be one way; if there is action,
that decision would be another.
So what we are looking at is the system, how it will evolve
down the road. As Iraq going to get out of this box? If so,
then Iran will take its own program somewhere else, North Korea
will behave in a certain way. Syria will. So will Libya.
Would Iraq pay for this? Then the others will take another.
Mr. Shays. I notice some of you are starting to look at the
clock, and I don't blame you. I want to talk a little bit about
a unilateral, and I want to talk a little about the
inspections, and I will let you talk about anything you want to
talk about before we go here.
I want to say to you that--I want to ask any of you, do you
think that the U.N. or any of the European countries, other
than Great Britain, would be talking seriously about inspection
in they didn't fear that the United States was going to go in
unilaterally? Is there anyone here? Can there be some consensus
that the fear that we would act unilaterally has been a
motivation in getting the U.N. to kind of think now about doing
these inspections?
Anybody want to comment on that?
Ms. Gottemoeller. Mr. Chairman, I believe that what has
happened in the past month or 6 weeks is that containment has
been removed from the table essentially. The previous policy of
the United States and its allies was to contain Iraq over the
last half decade or so. I think that in that context the Bush
administration was instrumental in affecting that because of
the fact that they were emphasizing unilateral action, military
action against Iraq.
Now, however, the allies look around for what other options
there are, and they see the notion of a more muscular
inspection regime, or cohesive inspection as several of us have
mentioned, as being a realistic option not only for finding out
what is happening, perhaps, with the overall weapons of mass
destruction capabilities of Saddam Hussein, but also then
moving toward disarmament. So I think it is a realistic option
and, as such, is welcomed by allies and friends of the United
States.
But I think the Bush administration was instrumental in
driving the debate in this direction because their focus on
unilateral military action removed containment from the table
as an option.
Mr. Shays. So then let's just get to the inspections.
Is it logical to assume that if he has--and he says he
doesn't; no chemical, biological or nuclear program--I get more
calls on not saying that word right than anything I do. Is
there logic that he will allow for unfettered inspections?
And it strikes me, the only thing that would get him to do
that is if he believes that he basically is annihilated, that
short of that, he's not going to allow us to look at the
chemical-biological program that he has.
Dr. Hamza, do you want to jump in? Anyone else?
Mr. Hamza. There is one test, which I mentioned earlier,
for this. If Iraq allows--if Iraq allows unfettered access, it
means allowed, it has nothing to hide. It means that, allow the
inspectors access to its scientists anywhere the inspectors
want. And the inspectors wanted it outside, but Iraq allowed
that once and scientists, his choice----
Mr. Shays. But even that's a question mark because the
families are still under his control.
Mr. Hamza. Yeah. And if Iraq does not allow this--and Iraq
is already balking at this, saying it will not allow the
Presidential sites. It will stick to its agreement with Kofi
Annan about the Presidential sites and other issues. Iraq then
will go to war rather than allow the inspection to be
unfettered, because then it will uncover its program and the
sanctions will become permanent. A regime change will become
the policy of a United States, and eventually the regime will
go anyway.
So I believe Iraq will also play its game again of trying
to block the inspectors, make the inspection more or less
meaningless, and effectively destroy the system.
Mr. Shays. Anybody else want to jump in?
Mr. Bunn. If I could just say one thing, and that is, I
agree that it is largely the fear of the United States that is
leading Saddam to be more open toward inspections than he has
been previously; but that fear will only maintain if he doesn't
think we're going to strike. Even if he does allow the
inspections, if we're going to strike anyway, then there's no
incentive to accept the inspections.
Mr. Shays. I agree with that.
Mr. Bunn. So it's my view that we have to be prepared to
take yes for an answer.
Mr. Shays. Provided they are truly unfettered, scientists
interviewed?
Mr. Bunn. Indeed. I'm quite a fan of the coercive
inspection concept that was put forward by the Carnegie----
Mr. Shays. Ms. Gottemoeller.
Ms. Gottemoeller. Sir, I just wanted to note that I agree
with Dr. Hamza that what Saddam Hussein will be staring at in
the case of a U.S. attack is regime change. And I think it's a
hypothesis that we have to test. Does he care more about his
survival than he does about the possibility of unfettered
inspections?
And the view that underlies the Carnegie study is that when
offered the choice, he will allow unfettered inspections,
particularly if they're backed up by military force, and he
sees that there's no way to wiggle out of it, that in that
case, he will permit unfettered inspections to go forward
because he does not want to face his own demise, his own
departure from power.
That is a hypothesis that is worth testing, I believe.
Mr. Shays. Dr. Lee.
Mr. Lee. The other issue is whether his chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons programs might be so well
concealed that, in fact, even the most unfettered and intrusive
inspection regime won't discover evidence of them. And that's a
question I simply don't know the answer to.
Mr. Shays. You know what? I think we're going to end on
that, unless Mr. Paine--we will end on this.
Did you want to make a comment first? Is there any question
we should have asked, any point that you wanted to make that
should be a part of the record?
I will say some of the real gems we've gotten on this
committee have been those last comments that people have wanted
to make for the record.
While you're thinking, I'm going to ask unanimous consent
that all written statements of Ms. Lisa Bronson, Deputy Under
Secretary of Defense; and the written statement and
accompanying materials submitted by Ed Markey of Massachusetts
be entered into the record at this point. And obviously no one
can object, so it will happen, and--nor would they object.
And obviously the material that Mr. Kucinich wanted in the
record we will put in as well.
Any closing comment by any of you before we adjourn?
Mr. Paine. Just on the inspections question.
I think, from the longer-term perspective, we have a
stake--all parties in this debate have a stake in indicating
the efficacy of international inspections, and particularly
more intrusive rather than less intrusive ones, to deal with
these kinds of uncertainties.
Do we really want to live in a world that is forever on the
brink of preemptive warfare because one country or another
perceives a developing threat to its security? And I think that
we're at a crossroads here, where we move on and step up the
international community's capacity to do this kind of work, or
we discredit the U.N. and its agencies and we proceed to a
different system of international relations where preemption
becomes a more commonplace form of national defense.
And this--I find hard to imagine the United States would be
the Nation that crystallizes this transformation in
international affairs.
Mr. Shays. I think the answer to your question is, we don't
want to live in a world like that. The question is, will it
require the--always the potential of a preemptive strike by the
United States to sometimes get action?
And one of the last--one of the hearings we had was with a
noted scientist who said the question he wasn't asked that he
wanted to answer was, what was his biggest fear, and he said
his biggest fear is that a small group of dedicated scientists
will create a biological--an altered biological agent that will
wipe out humanity as we know it.
I can't imagine the United States waiting for the U.N.
necessarily to act to stop those scientists from acting. So it
is kind of--the nightmare that I've had for a long time since
September 11 is, preemption has got to always be a potential
for the United States.
But in the spirit of your comment, getting the world to
work together, using--as you have pointed out, Ms.
Gottemoeller, getting a social, political, economic effort--
diplomatic--is clearly the way it has to be. And I do agree
that the United States, if it's doing it, has deemphasized it.
One of the best-kept secrets--even though it's military,
it's diplomatic as well; 40 countries meet in Tampa. This is
not state secret. Forty countries meet in Tampa every day and
work on how they should conduct the war in Afghanistan. They
supply men and women and equipment.
We have lost 45 Americans. We have lost 25 non-Americans
from other countries, just not--so there is this effort to work
with other countries, and we need to expand it to the other
areas.
I'm sorry, I didn't give you the last word.
Ms. Bryan. I wanted to ask, I wanted to remind you, you
asked last October for a GAO report on security at DOE
facilities, and it's nearly a year. We sense there's an urgency
over this issue; we would urge you to push them along on this
issue.
Mr. Shays. We will push them a lot.
Anyone else?
You've been wonderful witnesses and very patient with our
committee. I hope you have a good lunch. Thank you very much.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:30 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]