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were arrived at by a consensus of diverse parties, including American, European and Russian experts.  Among the findings:

1. The relationship between contributors and Russia should move from patronage to partnership.
2. An equal partnership carries additional responsibilities for Russia.  Russia must remove impediments to spending threat reduction funds, including a lack of transparency and access to sensitive sites, a lack of tax exemptions for this assistance, and a lack of liability protection for companies that invest in Russia.
3. The priorities of contributing governments need not be identical.  It is natural that each country would want to focus on a different aspect of the challenge.
4. When programs are carried out bilaterally, it places a premium on effective coordination.
5. Given Russia’s improving economic conditions, there needs to be an emphasis on self-sustaining programs.

Among the study’s recommendations:

1. Political momentum must be sustained through high-visibility projects, such as chemical weapons destruction and the decommissioning of nuclear submarines.
2. France, as the host of the next G-8 summit, needs to make an extra effort to advance the program.
3. The funding requirements for the program are vast, and new streams of funding must be found.  Some possible solutions:
1. Debt owed by Russia to G-8 countries could be forgiven in exchange for comparable investment into threat reduction by the Russian government.
2. Non G-8 countries could contribute to the program.
3. The United States should regard its $10 billion commitment as a floor, not a ceiling.  Additional U.S. contributions might encourage its partners to spend more.
4. Prior to the next G-8 summit, a senior group of officials should discuss reorganizing the G-8 bureaucracies to deal more effectively with the issue.
5. Russia and the United States need to ratify the bilateral threat reduction umbrella agreement, and Russia needs to conclude similar agreements with other countries.
6. All G-8 partners should look at legislation on the books that might inhibit nonproliferation programs.  The United States in particular should grant the president permanent authority to waive certification requirements for its threat reduction assistance.
7. Russia needs to accelerate the consolidation of its nuclear stockpile.
8. There must be increased transparency of tactical nuclear weapons.
9. Destruction of Russian tactical nuclear weapons should be accelerated.
10. One possible division of labor is to have European countries focus on improving the security at Russian civilian nuclear sites, while the United States focuses on nuclear security at military installations and weapons storage sites.
11. The blend-down rate of highly enriched uranium should be doubled.
12. There should be an increased effort to account for and secure biological weapons.
13. The job of securing chemical weapons has just begun.  The United States should focus on the chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuch’ye, and Europe should focus on the facility at Kambarka.
14. It is necessary to have a predictable flow of funds to threat reduction programs.
15. There should be increasing commercialization of weapons scientists.
16. Russia needs to increase security at its WMD sites even after CTR funding stops. 
17. Programs that focus on greater export control should be accelerated.
18. Threat reduction programs should be expanded beyond Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Remarks by Alexander Pikayev, Scholar-in-Residence and Non-Proliferation Program Co-Chair at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and advisor to the Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma:

There are two major problems with cooperative threat reduction programs in Russia today: a lack of Russian funding and bureaucratic disarray.

Russia could initially afford to pay only $2 million toward keeping its commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which made donor countries question Russia’s commitment to the endeavor.  There have been positive changes since 1998, however.  With increased economic growth, Russia was able to allocate more money to disarmament, including $200 million toward chemical weapons destruction.  Russia is no longer a client, and might spend up to $2 billion toward the non-U.S. portion of the G-8 Global Partnership.

There is much greater stability in the Russian bureaucracy, leading to more productive talks between Russia and donor countries.  Threat reduction programs are now starting to be exempted from taxes, and major U.S. laboratories are included in a list of international charities, making their grants exempt from income tax.  Grants from the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, however, are not yet tax exempt, although no taxes are currently being paid.  The ISTC could be asked to pay back taxes in the near future.

President Putin is extraordinarily powerful within Russia, and the G-8 summit in Kananaskis wisely included him in the creation of the Global Partnership.  There is now a high-level team in Russia that deals directly with the Global Partnership.  There is also a working group within the Russian Duma that is attempting to resolve legislative impediments to foreign assistance.

According to Putin, Russia has two priorities in disarmament: the elimination of chemical weapons and the dismantlement of general purpose nuclear submarines. 

Russia’s chemical weapons destruction program is its most expensive, at an estimated cost of $3 billion to $10 billion in the next 10 years.  Russia will now be able to meet its first CWC deadline.  But the fate of the Kambarka blister agent destruction facility is unknown, which is a serious concern because of the high risk of environmental contamination from such agents.

The dismantlement of general purpose nuclear submarines will cost $1 billion to $2 billion.  There is currently no infrastructure to destroy strategic submarines at Kamchatka.

Aside from these two priorities, Russia’s biological weapons complex is also a very important issue and needs an urgent solution.  And within the Russian nuclear complex, there are thousands of people with direct knowledge of how to make bombs who will become unemployed as Minatom downsizes this complex.  The Department of Energy’s Russian Transition Initiatives program [with its goal of finding commercial employment for former weapons scientists] is very important, because proliferation of expertise is as big a concern as proliferation of nuclear materials.

Remarks by Maurizio Martellini, Secretary General of the Landau Network-Centro Volta and for the International Working Group for the European Nuclear Cities Initiative, fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and advisor to the Italian Foreign Ministry on nonproliferation and the Global Partnership:

The legacy of the Cold War is such that the United States and Europe view the importance and methodology of cooperative threat reduction very differently.  From the U.S. perspective, the focus is on threat mitigation, while the Europeans believe that CTR is a way to integrate Russia with the West.  The European Union has abandoned the concept of the nation-state as a consequence of its integration, and the pillars of its foreign policy are soft-power rule, economic trade and human exchange.  Therefore, the issue of nonproliferation requires multilateral programs like the Global Partnership. 

In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States spent about $10 billion on threat reduction.   By contrast, in that same period, the EU spent about $500 million.

The European vision of successful nonproliferation engagement with Russia is to tap Russia’s vast scientific knowledge and apply it toward fulfilling European market needs.  The nuclear cities, in a sense, would be integrated into the European economic environment using a market approach.  The European Nuclear Cities Initiative launched by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and now under the coordination of the European Commission with the assistance of Minatom, has only been acting as an informal Forum of analysis and as a consultative body for all the interested parties regarding the conversion of the Russian nuclear weapons complex.

There has been a shift since September 11 away from nonproliferation toward counterterrorism.  The proliferation of nuclear materials to terrorists is seen as the most serious risk.  The brain drain of nuclear scientists exacerbates this concern because these scientists may migrate to rogue states.  It is necessary to use this new environment to spur more European action on threat reduction.

The G-8 Global Partnership is viewed in Europe as a way to do more economic trade.  It has been difficult, however, to coordinate the actions of 15 countries on this agenda.  There is inertia on the European side, however, to evaluate the risk of unconventional terrorist attacks, and more political work both by the United States and by the EU should lead to a stronger commitment from Europe.