Sometimes called the “cheapest security America ever bought,” CTR programs have shown notable progress in several areas despite the waxing and waning of Congressional funding. For about three tenths of 1 percent of the annual U.S. military budget, the Departments of Defense (DOD), Energy (DOE) and State pay for and administer various programs that continue to move forward on:
* elimination and the safe transportation and storage of nuclear, chemical and other weapons and their delivery vehicles;
* secure storage of fissile materials that come from destroyed nuclear weapons;
* safeguards to prevent the proliferation of weapons, components and weapons-related technology and expertise; and
* expanded military-to-military and defense contacts.
By April 1997, in compliance with START I, over 3,300 nuclear warheads had been transferred to Russia from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, with CTR providing – among other things – plasma cutters, computers, mobile cranes and incinerators to destroy liquid rocket fuel as the process went on. By then, 150 ICBM silos had been eliminated, 128 submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers and 35 strategic bombers had also been destroyed.
Most recently, some programs have faced substantial financial cuts, including several strategic weapons-related programs in Russia that had seen their budgets raised considerably in recent years as Russia worked to meet START I reduction and destruction levels by the December 2001 deadline. Those programs had had “caught up” to the original reduction and destruction timetables by late 2001, according to Clinton administration officials who, at the time, were monitoring the programs and funding.
According to a recent summary by the Arms Control Association, “The current Russian nuclear stockpile is estimated to include about 5,000 deployed strategic weapons, about 3,500 operational tactical nuclear weapons, and more than 11,000 stockpiled strategic and tactical warheads, for a total arsenal of about 19,500 nuclear warheads.” Russia has these large reserves partly because nuclear warhead dismantlement has “proven to be prohibitively expensive” and because Russia is still producing a limited number of new warheads, “largely because its warheads are designed to have far shorter operational lives [than their U.S. counterparts] and therefore must be replaced more frequently.”
On March 18, 2002, Senator Lugar introduced a bill that would expand CTR to include projects outside the states of the former Soviet Union. DOD would be authorized to use a maximum of $50 million in unspent CTR funds.
For amplification, updates and further details on the many projects and programs involved, see http://www.armscontrol.org/subject/tr/