COMBATING TERRORISM:
PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM

HEARING OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY,
VETERAN AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE
HOUSE GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE

September 24, 2002

WITNESSES:

DR. KHIDHIR HAMZA, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON MIDDLE EASTERN AFFAIRS AND FORMER DIRECTOR GENERAL, IRAQI NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM;   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;   DR. RENSSLEAR LEE, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, DEFENSE, AND TRADE DIVISION, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE;   ROSE GOTTEMOELLER, SENIOR ASSOCIATE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE;   CHRISTOPHER PAINE, SENIOR RESEARCHER, NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL;   DANIELLE BRYAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 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

BODY: REP. CHRISTOPHER SHAYS (R-CT): The 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 program 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 witness experts 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 involving diversion of plutonium or highly enriched uranium. Some of that material has never been recovered. research reactors in 58 nations generate weapons grade uranium kept under security arrangements ranging from adequate to appalling. To be sure, acquiring or 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 at facilities like the fissile materials 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 much more needs to be productively re-employed.

While this is our first hearing on these issues, it will not be our 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 203 Defense Authorization Bill. In the coming months we need to hear from the administration, from our government and private partners in this effort 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'm going to remind people that what you hear is available to the public. This is not a closed hearing. I'll say as a member of Congress, I am tired of the number of hearings I have that are so-called secret that the American people have a right to know. And if they just listen to what was being discussed today, they'd learn almost if not more than frankly what I learn behind closed doors.

(Laughter.)

You all set? May I present my ranking member, Mr. Kucinich, who has been very, very active on this committee.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH (D-OH): I 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 of 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, a Dr. Hamza, 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've 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.

You know, we spend billions of dollars in U.S. intelligence agencies and they've scoured every bit of evidence at their disposal. They haven't made that connection nor have they made a connection as Dr. Hamza has stated that Hussein has cooperated and collaborated with the Al-Qaeda because, at this point in the briefings that I have been privy to, there's been no connection between Iraq and 9/11 nor Iraq and the Al-Qaeda or Hussein and Al-Qaeda or the anthrax attacks.

So I'm 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 stated that Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons. Not just, that is, developing them or seeking to acquire them but that he currently possesses them. Now again, I've received briefings and no one in the briefings that I've received has been able to establish that Iraq currently possesses any kind of useable 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 United Nations inspectors have been to Iraq, have 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 and 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 don't 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. And I agree 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, United States 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 sacrifice, no matter how great the degree of regional conflagration and no matter that they don't even have a plan as to what to do after we conquer Iraq.

So, Mr. Chairman, I understand the gravity of this meeting, I'd like to offer Dr. Hamza a little bit of unsolicited advice. When you're here today, doctor, you're not speaking just to a media forum, you're speaking to the United States Congress and you'll be under oath and you'll be speaking on a topic of utmost gravity which reflects for many people here the 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'll 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.

REP. SHAYS: I thank the gentleman.

And we're joined by Ms. Schakowsky, the gentlelady from Illinois and a very active member and competent member of this committee.

REP. JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY (D-IL): 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 were actively seeking to obtain nuclear weapons. I consider these statements to be great cause for concern and it is important that we analyze this issue very carefully.

We need to understand the different ways that terrorist groups can acquire radiological or nuclear weapons and ways to prevent such actions from occurring. I'm eager to learn more 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'm hoping that 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 or will in turn use them on the United States and its allies. If the president's National Security Strategy report, in his report for 2002, had stated that the administration has, quote, "irrefutable proof" unquote, that Iraq has acquired nuclear weapons, if such irrefutable proof truly 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 non-proliferation would help convince a skeptical world that we're serious about nuclear proliferation. By solely concentrating our efforts on Iraq, it's getting harder to convince the world that this 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 non-proliferation 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 hand 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 inspections. I believe in coercive inspections to resume in Iraq and to continue to isolate Iraq if they push back.

It is vital that we work with our international allies and others in the international community to make sure that 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 have undertake aggressive actions, 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 to war and into harm's way.

Thank you.

REP. SHAYS: I thank you very much. I'm going to 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 will be very helpful. I will also say that you have five minutes to make a statement. But if you run over close to ten, I'll stop you but you have more than five and I am also going to say that we don't do the five minute rule, particularly when we have so few members. So, if a number of you want to jump in and answer a question, you can. So we're going to learn a lot today and it's going to be very informative.

Our panel is comprised of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, the president, Council on Middle Eastern Affairs, former director general, Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program. 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 in Natural 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'd ask you to stand. As you know, we swear in all our witnesses.

We have consistently throughout the years except only one and this was Senator Byrd. I chickened out. Will you raise your right hand? Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you will give before this subcommittee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

WITNESSES: I do.

REP. SHAYS: I note for the record the witnesses responded in the affirmative and let me just take care of one housekeeping. 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 a few days for that purpose. Without objection, so ordered.

I ask further unanimous consent that all witnesses be permitted to include their written statements in the record and without objection, so ordered. And that enables you, particularly those who will follow because we are just going down the row here -- if you want to just submit your testimony and speak extemporaneously, feel free to do that. It's five minutes and then a rollover. Okay?

Dr. Hamza, welcome. Let me make sure your mike is on. If you hit that mike in front of you, let's see if it's on there.

DR. KHIDHIR HAMZA: It's working now.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished members. If I may answer some of the questions raised earlier about my earlier statements. The anthrax, I did not say Iraq.

REP. SHAYS: Give us your statement. I'll let you answer those --

DR. HAMZA: Okay, that's fine. I just --

REP. SHAYS: You give us your statement and before -- this was a sneaky way for him to ask some questions before. And feel free to then respond to those points.

DR. HAMZA: Okay. That's fine.

REP. SHAYS: And important -- I was joking.

DR. HAMZA: The Iraqi Program actually, the Institute for Strategic Studies of London, did a good study of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It did declare, like the inspectors did, that Iraq do possess a working design for a nuclear weapon. It has all the components needed for a nuclear weapon except for the 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's 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 enriched uranium.

The institute states that Iraq, if it has fissile material right now, acquired this through black market or other means, it could produce a nuclear weapon within months. The estimate is correct but I think it misses the point in one aspect and that is, Iraq program is more serious than this. This is a program that's meant to produce an arsenal of nuclear weapons, not just one.

One nuclear weapon will not provide the regime with the deterrents 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, two of his neighbors and if he wants to continue on this path, he needs a much more credible deterrent than just one nuclear weapon because if he tests that, he loses.

The Iraqi program is meant to produce enriched uranium to bomb grade and it has two technologies to do that, already resolved 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 complicity of the German government in allowing him to go ahead and supply us with the technology needed for uranium enrichment, the judge was sympathetic and only sentenced him only to time served. So actually the only man caught smuggling nuclear technology in the weapon area to Iraq is out of jail now and actually served no serious jail time. He was sentenced to time served plus something like $32,000 in fines.

What we have in Iraq is really a program that, put together, it could in two to three years produce fissile material enough -- I estimate it could be, in two years operational and in three years it would have enough nuclear material for two to three nuclear weapons. I didn't say Iraq has right now nuclear weapons. The London Times misquoted, the reporter misquoted my statement and when I sent a 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 two to three 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 -- the inspectors were in Iraq, they did dismantle most of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure. The remaining issue in disarmament in Iraq is not just equipment and facilities. What is needed is really the whole infrastructure there 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, minders were always there during inspections. They didn't get the straight story from the scientists. They got the story 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 minders and if possible, so that no retribution can be taken by the Iraqi government against their families and their families go with them. And if the measure is to mean anything, if going and sending the inspectors back in is to be effective and to be the solution of the problem, well that's the accompanying measure that has to go with it.

The scientists we talk to outside Iraq. The only time it happened is when three scientists were sent to Vienna to speak 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 on the black market, I believe, is overstated. I don't think it is as easy as it has been billed. 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 and Russia right now than buyers. I don't 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 Iraq. The bigger concern is that Iraq will have its own production facilities in the nuclear area and then you are dealing with a 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 power -- 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 they're done.

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 a terrorist 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 -- Al-Qaeda knew this when they tried to contact the Pakistani scientist whose name, I believe, was Dr. Mohammed, 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 stopped.

So, what is needed by a terrorist is a safe -- more of a safe haven, a state sponsor that would provide him with this training and information safely without being caught right in the middle and the operation stopped.

Modern day terrorists are more in the information area and the training area, where the terrorists are taught with more 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 would be found out. He'll have problem transporting them, getting them to where he wants to get them and putting them in such a way that he could spread them or cause damage with them. A safer bet would be that he would be trained on how to handle a certain weapon site or a 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'll reserve the rest for the questions and answers.

REP. SHAYS: Let me do this. Let me have you respond now and then we'll have questions later, but I did interrupt you and you wanted to respond to the issues of claiming that Iraq was responsible for --

DR. HAMZA: Okay. 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 and improperly by some British reporter. Most of it was correct at the time. He said two to three months. I didn't say that. I said two to three years.

The other issue is the anthrax. I never said Iraq is known to have done the anthrax. What I said is Dr. Richard Spertzel, the chief weapons inspector for the Iraqi biological weapon program, thinks that Iraq may have its fingerprints or the -- especially the letter sent to Senator Daschle. They think the anthrax spores there on the powder, the quality used as a base as a substrate for putting the anthrax spores on is of such a quality that only Iraq possesses the technologically to do this and he thinks Iraqi fingerprints are on that kind of powder used.

For my side, all I could confirm is that the micron to five 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, okay. And I believe that they had two or three machines of that kind. So the powder technology, that's all I could confirm at the time. The powder technology is there, how it is used by the biologists -- they could manage to use it as a base to put -- as a carrier for the spores needed for the anthrax. That's the area for the biologists. I am not an expert in biological weapons and I used -- merely I reported what Dr. Spertzel already reported to Congress.

REP SHAYS: We will start out with the question with Mr. Kucinich and I'll follow him. And I apologize to Mr. Kucinich if he in any way thinks that I don't think this is important. It's a very serious issue and I'm happy you raised it and I didn't mean to make light of it.

Mr. Bunn, we'll go with you and you have the floor now.

MR. MATTHEW BUNN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's an honor to be here today to discuss what I think is --

REP. SHAYS: Move the mike in front.

MR. BUNN: -- 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. I won't burden you with more than five in my opening remarks.

Since September 11 we've 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 Iraq -- in Afghanistan, excuse me, were evidence of Al-Qaeda's continuing interest. They were primitive, I agree with Dr. Hamza, but on the other hand one doesn't 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 the materials right to 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 of a 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 guard 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 of 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 that these facts lead inescapably to one conclusion, and that is that 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, 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 simply is not in his nature. And particularly to a group like Al-Qaeda, which has sworn to destroy the secular governments of the Arab world like Saddam Hussein's government. The Defense Department's own assessment of the threat says that 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 and 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 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.

Only a seventh of Russia's highly enriched uranium stockpile has been destroyed and there remain highly enriched uranium stockpiles in research reactors all over the world that are insecure. The president has said that keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists 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 plan 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's the amount we spend in a single day on our military budget. And there is little sustained high level attention, and 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 the strong bipartisan support for the relevant budget, 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 just run through them very quickly because I'm 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 that Congress should direct the president to build on his achievements at the June G8 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 four years at the 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 kinds 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's crucial that we -- 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's 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 dirty bombs in my statement, but I will stop there, having used up more time than I should, for which I apologize.

REP. SHAYS: No need to apologize. I appreciate your testimony.

Dr. Lee.

MR. RENSSLEAR LEE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

REP. SHAYS: Would you put the mike a little closer to you?

MR. LEE: Certainly a major concern of American policy since 9/11 has been that terrorists might acquire some kind of a nuclear capability and turn it against targets on American soil and overseas. And we've 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 the 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 don't see it and authorities that I've talked to don't see it, in any of the 20 odd confirmed cases of seizures of highly enriched uranium or plutonium that have occurred internationally since the early 1990s. And indeed, one reasonably well documented case that Al-Qaeda is attempting to buy the ingredients of nuclear weapons has been recorded and this concerned a deal to purchase what purported to be enriched uranium of South African origin in the Sudan in 1993 or 1994. 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 efficient bombs.

I could 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's not inconceivable that terrorists could lay their hands on the perhaps 40- 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary to build a crude nuclear weapon. But accomplishing this would be no small feat for a pariah non-state 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 described at length on the Internet, the devil, as they say, is in the details and such considerations might lead terrorists to turn to the technically and logistically simpler path of building chemical or biological weapons or radiological dispersal devices. And Al-Qaeda seems to have explored these various options.

Another scenario -- and this also has been mentioned -- concerns the risk of secondary nuclear proliferation to terrorist and 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 a state was attacked and its survival was at stake, it might try to use terrorist agents as delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction. But this again raises entirely new sets 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 that their interest in having nuclear weapons, even if their efforts to date to secure them seem haphazard and unsophisticated, terrorists can 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 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 efforts 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 set 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 counter terrorism policy. U.S. finance 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. tactical 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 attentions of the terrorist adversaries themselves. Our demand side strategy would presuppose a broader international intelligence and law enforcement effort to track procurement networks of terrorists and radical states.

In addition, successes in the war on terrorism and other spheres, such as destroying terrorist 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.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you very much, Mr. Lee.

Ms. Gottemoeller.

MS. ROSE GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you very, Mr. Chairman. I agree with what has already been said this morning regarding the threat from the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, that is the threat that materials could escape into terrorists' hands. I would like to concentrate in my five 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 co- 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 the Senate together on this critical set of issues. I would 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 of 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's why I welcome very much the recent agreement at the G8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada where the other G8 countries agreed to expend $10 billion on these problems in the next 10 years to be matched, I would note, by $10 billion by the United States. This is an excellent investment in the national security of all countries around the world, the G8 countries of course included.

Greater international cooperation to enhance the physical protection of nuclear and radiological material 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 G8 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 non-proliferation treaty and its accompanying regime. But I think we also need to keep before us a keen awareness of the urgency of the threat. Recently, I have enumerated certain principles that I believe will be important to achieving successful international cooperation to enhance nuclear security in the counter terrorism struggle. For example, projects I believe should be created that would match counter terrorism priorities. Just as an example, the United States and Russia have not particularly concentrated on lower level nuclear waste or radioactive source material in their material protection control and accounting programs.

We've always stressed nuclear weapons useable 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 of radiological weapons raised. These are primarily public panic and economic costs, including clean-up. In that case, we would focus, not so much on the protection of radiological sources, but on incident mitigation programs of various kinds.

I've already stressed the need for international partnerships 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 on cooperative training programs based on the U.S. Radiological Assistance Program which was developed as a result of the Three Mile Island accident.

The RAP teams conduct on site real time detection serving, modeling and analyses activities using non-sensitive 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 terrorism threat in a broad swath of the United States. It would be good for any country facing such a threat to be able to call on international resources in this kind of emergency. Much as four relief crews are brought to bear in large natural disasters such as earthquakes and forest fires.

I stress that projects should reinforce international arms control and non-proliferation regimes. I mentioned the non- proliferation treaty. But, in closing, I would like to stress that I think we need to go beyond a simple emphasis on the Non-proliferation Treaty and its future health, continuation and strengthening. I think we need to think about ways to turn adversaries in non-proliferation policy into non-proliferation partners. And I will give you a specific example of that.

India and Pakistan have for many years taken a combatist stance with regard to the Non-proliferation 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 non- proliferation policy. However, in the crisis era 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 do not fall into terrorist hands.

I therefore believe that it is important to develop joint projects to reduce such threats in a cooperative manner as I've been discussing and countries such as the United States, India and Pakistan has each amassed individual experience over the years in protecting nuclear materials and radiological sources. Such experience can be shared in a way that could benefit others. If the United States, together with India and separately with Pakistan, work to share best practices on protection and control of nuclear assets, the United States would be taking the first step towards transforming these countries from adversaries to partners in the non-proliferation arena.

This is but one example, sir, of the way I think we need to be thinking about working it. Much different than the way that we have worked with these countries in the past where we have, in fact, tended to keep them at arms length with regard to the non-proliferation regime and they kept us at arms length as well. So it's very difficult now to engage but I think we need to be thinking in imaginative ways about how to do so.

In closing, one final word, I believe that it will be important to make a case to the international community for cooperation that 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 Threat 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 that 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.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you very much.

Mr. Paine.

MR. CHRISTOPHER PAINE: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Unfortunately the approaches least likely to succeed from a technical perspective are the ones that are attracting all the attention in funding -- bring it down -- is that better? It has 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 dependence on 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 outlaw regimes before they gain access to nuclear weapons or explosive materials. But sole or primary reliance on this strategy suffers from several weaknesses. Even if current efforts to oust Saddam Hussein is successful, there is no guarantee of continuing success over the long term with other such cases. Success in 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 11th.

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 1990s or a hostile regime change that could swiftly occur within an existing sovereign state, a nuclear weapons capable state or a quick preventive war 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 preventive war against Japan.

Heavy reliance on interdiction likewise, interdiction of illicit commerce in 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 or 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 and over the next 10 years in Russia or the United States and has no provisions, none, for identifying or controlling the number of non-strategic nuclear weapons, including Russian tactical nuclear weapons.

Regrettably, the administration has demonstrated that it is more interesting of preserving a bloated U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, currently numbering some 10,000 intact nuclear devices than eliminating the proliferation and terrorist threat represented 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 U.S. and Russian warhead and fissile material production and to steadily eliminating 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 weapons 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 a yield and a range of 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 one 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 is some ambiguity and confusion in the administration's arguments. There is a history of antagonism between Islamic Jihadists and the decadent secular Baathist regime. You will recall that Osama 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 feared 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 contradiction. The Bush administration argues that the threat of Saddam's unprovoked nuclear or bioweapon aggression against the U.S. 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's 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 dis- information regarding the imminence of the Iraqi threat or the administration has embarked on a bit of a gamble that could end very badly for some innocent civilians in Israel, the U.S. 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 sufficiency in 1995, that is the amount of material that the IAEA regards as a threshold amount to making a nuclear weapon. We were thwarted by the IAEA and the State Department, which claimed that using technically correct safeguards 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 (ph) experiment. Thank you.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you very much.

Ms. Bryan.

MS. DANIELLE BRYAN: Mr. Chairman, Mr. Kucinich and other members of the subcommittee, thank you very much --

REP. SHAYS: If you'd move your -- move the mike closer to you --

MS. BRYAN: -- for inviting me to testify today.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you. You're welcome.

MS. BRYAN: First I want to commend you, Mr. Chairman, for requesting a GAO investigation of security at 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 weapons facilities. Just prior to September 11th last year POGO completed our investigation and concluded that the nation's 10 nuclear weapons facilities which housed 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 attack.

The result 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 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 NRC 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 at 65 plants, are confident their plant could defeat a terrorist attack. The guards say morale is very low and they are under-equipped, undermanned, under-trained and underpaid, despite the ads many of you in Congress will have read, 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 threat 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 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 farfetched 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 could 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 pools 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 U.S. and Russia are awash in excess special nuclear materials. The U.S. 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 at Pantex, 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 irradiation shields so that it would be less attractive for theft. Instead of moving ahead with this plan, however, the U.S. 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 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 one and two hours even though the mock terrorist attacks have shown to be over between three and 10 minutes. The NRC must upgrade its requirements of nuclear plants to expect the guards on site 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 this situation. We welcome your oversight of these agencies. Nothing will improve without such congressional involvement.

Thank you.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you very much.

Dr. Baram.

MR. AMATZIA BARAM: Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I am honored. On December 3, 2001, Saddam Hussein met with a group of private sheiks from the southern part of Iraq. One of the panegyrics that one of the tribal sheiks read went like this -- this was by the way in southern Iraqi colloquial, so allow me to present it into colloquial English, "From inside America how five planes flew, 6000 infidels died. Bin Laden did not do this. The luck of the president" in square brackets "Saddam Hussein did it."

I'm not a nuclear scientist nor am I an expert on proliferation, I'm an historian. I'm an historian and a political analyst. All I can offer you is my analysis of Saddam Hussein's intentions and vision. And you be the judges whether this makes sense or not. I've been studying Saddam Hussein and his regime for the last 22 years so I'll try to at least explain 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 their 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 take revenge. So don't mess with me, I'm taking revenge on America. So certainly I'll do it when it comes to you. Be careful. B: To make it clear to the American people and the administration as well, the administration as well as people, I am behind the 9/11 attack on America. C: Not to admit that he is behind the 9/11 attack. Namely 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 9/11 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 four to five 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 domestic opponents. He perfected it to the level of an art. Well, 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.

In 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 -- that somebody who he wanted to harm and then he meet with him and say to him I heard that something terrible happened to your family. I'm really sorry about that, but the guy he approached would suspect would, in fact, know he did it. But Saddam would say, of course, I'm sorry about it and would never admit it. But 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 up 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 you'll have some respite, some recession, some short periods that he won't bother you, 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 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 9/11 attack on America? Of course I don't know. There are some indications he was in touch with Al-Qaeda but these don't produce clear cut evidence that he was behind it. But the need is to keep you informed that he can do 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 Osama 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. He's consuming alcohol apparently in large quantities but for public consumption he is a born again Muslim. He prays fives times a day, or so he says, or so he projects the image of and so on and he imposed 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 let me say again, that's not Islamic but it all is presented as Islamic, as return to Islam.

About bin Laden. I advise you to read bin Laden's Fatwa, rabbinical sakaloha (ph) Yiddish, Jewish tradition, from February, 1998. All I can say about it is, I have it. All I can say about it is it sounds exactly 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, Hezbollah and Assad, Hezbollah are fundamentalistic Islamic, Assad is really a state, secular President Assad of Syria and they cooperate rather effectively. So that's not a reason to say this can never happen.

I'm just saying 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 Islam politics, you can never trust these people a year from now. But he can and he might provide them with weapons he himself can produce provided again and that -- 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.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you very much. 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 and 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.

REP. KUCINICH: I want to thank the gentleman.

To Dr. Hamza, I have a map of the region here. It's 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 --

REP. KUCINICH: So you cannot tell where the sites are?

MR. HAMZA: Nobody can actually.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay.

MR. HAMZA: Because the sites are now mostly underground, according al-Haideri, who defected recently and built some of those sites. The sites --

REP. KUCINICH: You say they're underground. Do you know where they are underground?

MR. HAMZA: They are all over the country. They are within civilian infrastructure and government infrastructure.

REP. KUCINICH: So you're saying there are nuclear sites all over the country?

MR. HAMZA: Yes.

REP. KUCINICH: Underground?

MR. HAMZA: Underground.

REP. KUCINICH: But no one knows where they are?

MR. HAMZA: Nobody knows. Some are above ground, some underground, some in civilian infrastructure. Nobody -- that's why inspection is problematic right now.

REP. KUCINICH: You know, I'm certainly in agreement with 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.

REP. 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 Iraq right now exactly where the sites are located. They are spread, fragmented and hidden.

REP. KUCINICH: Well, when --

MR. HAMZA: That would be an easy job if somebody knows and can tell you right away and you just go there.

REP. KUCINICH: Well, linguistic construction is a marvelous science and 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.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay. They could be underground, they could be above ground, nobody knows?

MR. HAMZA: Correct.

REP. KUCINICH: 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 weapon program, since already I said there is not a single defector that came out of Iraq from the core of the program. That 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 some -- like al-Haideri, the civil engineer. Lots of indicators, including equipment purchases, intercepted purchases, activity of certain groups. So what we have is what you have always in a nuclear weapon. The Indian test in 1974 -- there were no proof and everybody was talking about circumstantial evidence.

REP. SHAYS: If the gentleman would suspend a second. Ms. Schakowsky may be able to get back in time. But I just want you to look at her, because she's going to be contacting through the committee those of you to answer questions and we will respectfully request that you respond to the questions in writing. She may be back in time, but just --

MR. HAMZA: Okay.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you. I'm sorry to interrupt. The gentleman has the floor.

MR. HAMZA: That's all right. Now --

REP. KUCINICH: Well, let me ask you this. What kind of a weapon is Iraq trying to build: a Hiroshima bomb, you know, a gun-type uranium device? Or a Nagasaki bomb, or a plutonium implosion device, a thermonuclear bomb, a radiological bomb, or all of the above?

MR. HAMZA: It's both nuclear and radiological. We already tested. That's been explained by the inspectors who already were there. Iraq tested the radiological bomb in 1988, but tested it in the desert, not in a building or an environment where --

REP. KUCINICH: What year was that, sir?

MR. HAMZA: 1988. And that was --

REP. KUCINICH: And 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 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 have documents and everything was 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. And --

REP. KUCINICH: When was that?

MR. HAMZA: It was when I was there and it continued, I believe.

REP. KUCINICH: Did you work on that?

MR. HAMZA: Yes. I worked on the design.

REP. KUCINICH: And when were you there?

MR. HAMZA: Yes.

REP. KUCINICH: When?

MR. HAMZA: I was till 1994.

REP. KUCINICH: And you were working on that at 1994, and when is the last --

MR. HAMZA: No, 90 --

REP. KUCINICH: 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 till 1994.

REP. KUCINICH: Was this a facility that inspectors later on saw?

MR. HAMZA: Yes. It is in El Ethir (ph) facility. Inspectors were there, they destroyed the facility and destroyed some of the equipment. They had what is called then -- 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.

REP. KUCINICH: To your knowledge, were there ever any United States 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.

REP. KUCINICH: Anything -- for example?

MR. HAMZA: I don't know of any that the U.S. itself -- but the Germans did supply us with some of the equipment we used to test and develop the nuclear weapon.

REP. KUCINICH: What was provided?

MR. HAMZA: By the U.S. government -- by the U.S. sources?

REP. KUCINICH: By the German government, you were saying.

MR. HAMZA: By German and other sources, we had Japanese sources, we had fast cameras that --

REP. KUCINICH: When was that?

MR. HAMZA: That was in '89/90.

REP. KUCINICH: That was a time that, 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.

REP. KUCINICH: -- the State Department that there was United States 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 on 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 experience -- which is valid, it's your experience -- be interpreted by the media today as being proof of the current existence in Iraq of useable 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 useable weapons of mass destruction. And that's what I have to go on. So I appreciate your --

MR. HAMZA: You mean nuclear or otherwise?

REP. KUCINICH: I'm -- Dr. Hamza, please. I'm saying that I'm taking my position based on information I received from our Central Intelligence Agency. So thank you for being here, and I'm going to ask the chair if he'd 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, 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.

REP. SHAYS: I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Tierney.

REP. SHAYS: I want to know -- I'm going to make a statement and 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 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 point. I'm going to go right down the row. Dr. Hamza.

MR. HAMZA: Actually, in a 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, yes.

REP. SHAYS: Let me just repeat the question again.

MR. HAMZA: Yes.

REP. SHAYS: None of you disagree with my statement that he had a chemical, biological and 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 programs. 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.

REP. SHAYS: 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.

REP. 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 the negative. On the other hand, I think that full deployment and mobilization of our intelligence capabilities, including inspectors, can certainly come to some appropriate answers that can give us grounds for making decisions.

REP. 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 nigh 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 towards disarmament that we need to concentrate on.

REP. SHAYS: Mr. Paine?

MR. PAINE: My view, I think in 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 satisfied.

REP. SHAYS: You gave an answer you wanted to give, and I appreciate it and so on. But I do want to ask where does 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?

REP. SHAYS: The American government. Should the American government --

MR. PAINE: I --

REP. SHAYS: No, no, no. Should the people who oppose intervention have to demonstrate that he has stopped the program? Where does the burden of proof lie?

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 thoroughgoing international inspection. My answer to the question is I don't know and the burden of proof is on Hussein's regime to comply with international inspections. But that's the best I can do.

REP. 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.

REP. SHAYS: Okay. You have some great expertise, but I understand your response.

Dr. Baram?

MR. BARAM: Saddam stopped the inspection for a reason. According to 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.

REP. SHAYS: Okay. Do you believe, Dr. Lee, that he has continued his programs?

MR. LEE: Congressman, I really don't have the requisite body of -- or access to intelligence information to allow me to answer that.

REP. SHAYS: And do you need intelligence to be able to answer that question?

MR. LEE: Well, I would certainly hope that having absorbed the lessons of 9/11 and this horrendous, catastrophic experience, that we are beginning to understand again the importance of intelligence as a tool for anticipating threats against the United States, including threats from --

REP. SHAYS: Yes, I would totally agree with that. I don't know how that quite fits in to the question of 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 that I have to come down as an agnostic on this issue.

REP. SHAYS: You have no belief? You have no -- 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.

REP. SHAYS: Yes, 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, 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 the inspectors were thrown out, every attempt would have been made by the regime to restart that nuclear weapons program as well.

REP. SHAYS: Mr. Paine?

MR. PAINE: Sir?

REP. SHAYS: Do you believe that he has continued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons?

MR. PAINE: From open source literature, yes. From what I read in open sources, there is 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 a preemptive attack --

REP. SHAYS: We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Let me just say we're going to have lots of passes here.

MR. PAINE: Sure. I mean, I -- yes, I think that --

REP. SHAYS: But we're going --

MR. PAINE: -- certainly what's available in all the media in open source would lead a disinterested observer to conclude that he has continued these programs.

REP. SHAYS: Dr. Lee, is there anything -- any reason why you would think he would have stopped, if he had a program --

(Audio break)

MR. LEE: -- 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 now.

REP. SHAYS: Do you think that was logical before 9/11? Do you think he had any big fear before 9/11? I mean, this is a country that didn't respond when our soldiers were bombed in Germany. We didn't respond to the Hezbollah 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.

REP. 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, we're going to be turning -- 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 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.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

REP. SHAYS: I'm sorry --

REP. TIERNEY: I'm going to take it in a different direction than I --

REP. SHAYS: Yeah. Let me just say, Dr. Baram, are you -- you've made a request that you be excused. Can you just make -- do you have, like, five minutes in case he needs to --

MR. BARAM: Yeah, sure. Five minutes, yes.

REP. TIERNEY: No, I'm fine.

REP. SHAYS: Okay. Thank you very much. You're going to be giving a lecture.

I appreciate you being here.

MR. BARAM: Thank you very much. Can I just answer your question briefly?

REP. TIERNEY: What question?

REP. SHAYS: Well, I did ask --

MR. BARAM: No, this is the same question you addressed to others. Before I go, I just --

REP. SHAYS: Yes, you may. You may do that.

MR. BARAM: If it's helpful.

REP. SHAYS: I'll give you more time.

MR. BARAM: First of all, I'm sure most people -- or everybody here read Scott Ritter's which he wrote after he already resigned from his position. And even though his views today are Iraq has nothing, have a look at his book. There is a very frightening list of things which he and inspectors believe Iraq still had when they left Iraq in 1997/1998. So, yes, he still has those things.

Further, even more importantly I think, Saddam is assembling his nuclear scientists once very three or four weeks in front of the TV and he is telling them -- by the way, he has never dispersed them. They are already -- they are always together since 1990. About 18,000 people led by some scientists.

REP. SHAYS: How many thousand?

MR. BARAM: Eighteen thousand, one eight. Eighteen thousand people are still assembled as one feast (ph), you might call it. He has never dispersed them. Nuclear -- not just scientists, of course, technicians and engineers and --

REP. 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 -- no, whatever you say you need to -- they need to be able to respond to you. So if you want to go 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 -- maybe I'll just say one thing. I can show TV footing (sic) in which he is 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 trying to impress us with the fact that he is developing nuclear weapons in order to deter you from attacking --

REP. SHAYS: Let me just see if there's a follow up before you're allowed to leave.

REP. KUCINICH: I just ask unanimous consent to read the article in the Independent --

REP. SHAYS: You have the floor.

REP. KUCINICH: Just 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 U.S. 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 six months. Far from being an inspector at the U.N., lads (ph), 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.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. I just want to follow up 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 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 that's the best way that 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 that may want to comment to it, 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 Iran or Libya or Syria or anybody else.

MR. PAINE: 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 openly or clandestinely the materials that would be stolen or sneaked out of Russia in some form. So there's a kind of diffusion 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 material.

REP. TIERNEY: And that would be, wherever it's going to end up --

MR. PAINE: Yes. But there are many other --

REP. TIERNEY: -- this would be a good starting point?

MR. PAINE: I'm sorry?

REP. TIERNEY: I guess what I'm trying to do is focus on where the starting point would be for any materials that could end up eventually causing important 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 there are -- the weaknesses of the international safeguard system are such that material could be taken from research reactors that have highly enriched uranium fuel. It could be --

REP. TIERNEY: And where would we find those?

MR. PAINE: All over the world, sir. They're in many countries, put there at the behest of the 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.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Ms. Gottemoeller? Just jump in.

(Cross talk.)

MS. GOTTEMOELLER: If I may just 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 is a massive amount of material. We believe that approximately 1500 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's why we worry about the Russian Federation.

Compared to any other country of the world, only the United States came anywhere close to producing that amount of weapons usable material and all security melted down in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992. So that's 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 Arms for Peace Program wherein highly enriched uranium went to research reactors in Africa and other continents. But the Russians had 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.

Thank you.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Would you do me a favor? Would you just pull the head of that microphone straight at you so the very top of it is near your face so that we just hear you talking into it?

MR. LEE: Okay. There are a lot of fissile materials stored outside of weapons in the former 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 in Russia and other states, there are disenchanted underemployed scientists who might be willing to sell this material. But the problem for the terrorists is gaining access to these facilities.

This is a problem that is a formidable challenge for any pariah terrorist group or the likes of Al-Qaeda, not to mention Hezbollah, Hamas or any other group. They are the ultimate outsider. They have to somehow -- they are not going to be invited to visit these nuclear facilities. Delegations of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah don't tour the former Soviet Union. So it's really a question whether you're going to see the potential sellers and the potential buyers ever being able to make this critical connection.

REP. TEIRNEY: So you're 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's a clear and present danger, no.

MR. BUNN: Let me go back in the opposite direction for you. First of all, it's important for the committee that today there are no global binding standards for how well nuclear materials 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 standard. And a lot of this material is very insecure. I agree with Dr. Lee that it's going to be hard for Al-Qaeda to be wandering aimlessly around in the former Soviet Union without being detected. But that's 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 the option of, if an insider has succeeded in stealing material which is most of what we've seen 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've seen has not been organized crime but what I like to call comically disorganized crime. People had no clue how to make contact with the buyer but we should not rest our national security on the notion that that will be true forever.

REP. TIERNEY: You know, given those comments, whatever happens in Iraq, those situations are still going to exist. You know there are still people out there that we feel are going to be interested in getting those materials to do or at least to be prepared to use leverage to increase their own security or to go after other people. So we have two (problems ?) one with weapons grade material in the Soviet Union and we have to have a strategy or plan of what we're going to do to diminish that availability. Am I right? Alright, and we have some programs in effect. We're not funding appropriately and we probably need to expand them. 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'll perhaps begin. I think frankly we have the right suite of programs now, enhancing the protection of weapons usable materials on warheads, I believe, for 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 G8 initiative, 10 plus 10 over 10 where G8 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 comment, 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 States 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 records. Certainly the media at the time made much of this fact. Thank you.

REP TIERNEY: Thank you. My time is up.

MR. BUNN: Can I just jump in on the answer to that question though?

REP. TIERNEY: Apparently you can. I've got more time.

MR. BUNN: Certainly resources are important. At the moment, though, our efforts to secure nuclear warheads and materials are not primarily resource constrained. They're 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. And if we're going to get it done quickly in a way that it will stay done that will get the Russian buy-in that's so crucial to sustaining security for the long haul, we're going to need to work in a more partnership-based approach, and that's described in my testimony.

If you look at the warhead situation, there's, to my mind, a scandal in that there is today equipment that was purchased by the Department of Defense five 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. Ministry of -- the U.S. Department of Defense and the Russian Ministry of Defense over exactly how much access the U.S. would be granted at these sites have been allowed to just drag on and on.

And then when that disagreement was finally resolved this past spring, then the Bush administration decided not to certify Russia's compliance with the Nunn-Lugar conditions and put additional months of delay in the path of getting these warheads secured. That's' the kind of thing that in my judgment wouldn't happen if we had a Tom Ridge- like figure pushing these things forward every day.

And finally, I should emphasize again it's not just a former Soviet Union problem. These kinds of stockpiles exist all over the world and that's why it's 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.

REP. TIERNEY: Well, I guess that's the second part of it. And the first part that I was focusing on were the problems within the Soviet Union and what programs we have in place. And I think you make a good point, we need some leadership, and I would expand on the Tom Ridge-like thing, I would give more authority that Mr. Ridge seems to be getting. He's a marvelous man but I wish that he had been given a little more authority and been able to do a lot more. So 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 or Russian problems where it might originate -- it might be the sources of this. And for that, I think, Mr. Bunn, you were talking about the need for some international agreement, something unfortunately this administration seems abhorrent of or whatever, but we need to have international cooperation to try and raise the bar and establish the standards that we're going to have to try and do it. And what would that look like, if you might all want to comment on that?

MR. BUNN: For years I've been advocating an amendment to the Physical Protection Convention to create stringent standards for security of nuclear material. I've given up. The negotiations on that amendment are underway and it will be an amendment that will have a very modes 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 G8 summit in June in establishing this global partnership against the spread of weapons and materials 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's much more promising than formal treaty negotiations in this particular area.

I would say, though, that one of the concerns that I have that is borne out by this hearing today, and that is that when a momentous decision like whether to go to war is underway, it tends to drive out the leadership time and attention available for other matters.

REP. TIERNEY: Before you stop talking about it, it also drives out some of the press, I noticed, that if you look at the broader problem that's going to be with us for a long time --

MR. BUNN: Indeed. And I think to build the kind of fast-paced program to secure these nuclear materials around the world it's going to take a lot of high level political heavy lifting. And I'm very concerned that if we're spending the next couple of years focused on war with Iraq, that that kind of leadership attention is not going to be available.

MR. PAINE: Yes. You know, the first rule is do no harm in your own home. And this administration is pushing some misguided programs that are actually increasing the risk of nuclear terrorism, and I'd like to just point those out. Sometimes the right hand doesn't 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, pyro- processing of spent fuel and the development of advanced plutonium breeder reactors.

The Department of Energy right now is encouraging joint research with Minatom, that's 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 non-weapon 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.

And 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's 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'm 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 further support."

REP. TIERNEY: Can we just push that into English a little bit for me? You're telling me that in the administration's H.R. 4, the bill that went through the House, there's a provision that --

MR. PAINE: They're pushing international plutonium research, sir.

REP. TIERNEY: Right. So that essentially any other country that would set up a similar statute or a similar rule to abide by in their own country could say that they were doing this on an innocent basis, has nothing to do with weapons and they're just doing the same kind of research the United States is doing.

MR. PAINE: Yeah. The dilemma is that 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. They have just put out a huge report on what they call their generation four roadmap for the future of the nuclear fuel cycle which includes collaborative research with foreign countries and collaborative deployment in essence of plutonium breeder reactors.

REP. TIERNEY: So, on the one hand we're trying to put in back in the box and the on the other hand we're letting it out?

MR. PAINE: Yes. The international safeguard system is not equipped to deal with these facilities that currently operate in this area. And, 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're recommending an eightfold reduction in the significant quantity because these small diverted quantities can be combined into a weapon.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Do you want a go?

REP. SHAYS: Yes. I'd like to pursue in my next round some of the questions Mr. Tierney had but I want to kind of go in some progression here. I think it's clear he had it before the Gulf War, he had it after and when the inspectors were kicked out, I think it's very clear he continued. I'm willing to make that assumption without much concern that I have to demonstrate it because I think logic just dictates it. But I want to then go -- Dr. Hamza, you were involved in the nuclear program until when?

MR. HAMZA: I was involved in various capacities until 1990. After that in training and consultancy up to 1994.

REP. SHAYS: So you weren't running the program in 1994 when you --

MR. HAMZA: No. No.

REP. SHAYS: Did you get fired?

MR. HAMZA: I was as a consultant to the program.

REP. SHAYS: Did you get fired? Were you not doing a good job?

MR. HAMZA: No. 1990 is part of a configuration that more or less toned down what is 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.

REP. SHAYS: So, I mean this was after the war in other words.

MR. HAMZA: Yeah, that's after the war.

REP. SHAYS: And that's obviously when the inspections started?

MR. HAMZA: Yeah, yeah. Keep us out of the way of the inspectors.

REP. SHAYS: It's 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.

REP. SHAYS: Okay.

MR. HAMZA: That's the inspectors' concerns is also (inaudible.)

REP. SHAYS: And that's basically a six month timetable. In other words, from getting that plutonium or highly enriched uranium?

MR. HAMZA: No. Does the institute often International Institute of Strategic Research concerns us also and the inspectors concerns us also. Not just mine.

REP. SHAYS: So the real issue is then how do you get that fuel? I say nuclear core. When we talk grams, kilograms, a gram is the size of what, a pill, a gram?

MR. HAMZA: No.

REP. SHAYS: A kilogram would be the size of a brick?

MR. HAMZA: No. No.

REP. SHAYS: No. What would it be?

MR. HAMZA: Very small. Uranium is one of the heaviest materials around.

REP. SHAYS: So would a kilogram be a size of the switch that goes --

MR. HAMZA: Probably a kilogram would be less than half of one- third of this cup here.

REP. SHAYS: Okays.

MR. BUNN: Enough HEU for a bomb is more or less the size of a softball if it's an implosion type design of the kind Dr. Hamza was --

REP. SHAYS: Could you use the mike next to you. I'm sorry.

MR. BUNN: Enough HEU for a bomb is more or less the size of a softball if it's in a metal form and it's the kind of bomb Dr. Hamza was working on designing -- an implosion bomb.

REP. SHAYS: And, Mr. Bunn, it's highly radioactive?

MR. BUNN: One of the dirty little secrets is that it's not very radioactive. If you sprinkled highly enriched uranium on your Cornflakes 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. So it's 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.

REP. SHAYS: Doesn't it have to be encased in this incredibly large container to --

MR. BUNN: No.

REP. SHAYS: Does anyone disagree with that? Okay.

MR. HAMZA: The Chinese actually, Congressman, 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.

REP. SHAYS: And obviously the bomb itself would -- 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. HAMZA: Yes.

REP. SHAYS: Okay.

MR. BUNN: Depends in particular of the speed of the explosives and the symmetry of the explosive.

REP. SHAYS: So we basically have -- tell me how many softballs we have out in the world, rather than telling me how many tons.

MR. BUNN: There's enough nuclear material in the world for almost a quarter million nuclear weapons.

REP. SHAYS: So we're basically saying a quarter of a million softballs are out there.

MR. BUNN: Correct.

REP. SHAYS: Okay. Would you speak to what Ms. Bryan spoke about, about talking -- I think you did -- talking about -- we know we've 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 didn't hear Ms. Bryan, maybe I should come back to it.

MS. BRYAN: No. You heard me right.

REP. SHAYS: But would that be a dirty bomb or would it actually be an explosion?

MS. BRYAN: No. That would actually be a nuclear detonation. I mean I don't mean to step on --

REP. SHAYS: Why don't you jump in?

MS. BRYAN: -- on Mr. Bunn. I actually, just in case in you asked, brought the writings of Luis Alvarez, who's 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 up 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's 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."

REP. SHAYS: Okay. Does it have to be a specific kind of conventional bomb that ignites the, causes the nuclear explosion?

MS. BRYAN: I don't have clearance so I don't know exactly how it's done.

REP. SHAYS: This is what is confusing me and I'm exposing my ignorance and I'll then let others jump in. What's confusing me is that I've always thought you had to know how to make a nuclear bomb in order to have a nuclear bomb explosion and now what you're saying before this committee, and obviously it's well known, but I didn't know it, you could basically cause a nuclear explosion with nuclear fuel. And we're going to start with Mr. Lee, Mr. Paine and Mr. Bunn, Dr. Hamza.

Dr. Lee.

MR. LEE: Well, I'll give you again an ambiguous answer on this. There's a wide variety of opinion 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 material, fissile material -- enriched uranium say -- to make a nuclear bomb. On the other hand, many other people say that you know, look it took the United States, 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 sciences that this is a complex technical task that would require for terrorists to assemble some people with hands on knowledge how to make a bomb and there's no evidence that I've 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.

REP. SHAYS: Let me just go to Mr. Paine first and then Mr. Bunn and then Ms. Bryan.

MR. PAINE: Yes. It obviously matters what you're trying to do and what you're working with. If you're 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 are going to start because they're half of a critical mass. You bring them together, you're going to start a chain reaction and if that chain reaction proceeds, it's going to heat the material, cause it to expand and the chain reaction will stop. If you assemble those two things with sufficient velocity there isn't a chance for the material to heat up and dissemble 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 the Hiroshima bomb, our first bomb, a projectile arrangement, a projectile of uranium going into a kind of anvil of highly enriched uranium. That's how they assemble the two pieces. And you have to just assemble them with sufficient velocity and you will get a nuclear explosion.

REP. SHAYS: Okay. But it doesn't -- but, but -- the question I guess I'm wondering though is with a conventional explosion do you create that effect that you just talked about?

MR. PAINE: With a conventional explosion?

REP. SHAYS: Yeah, next to this core --

MR. PAINE: Yeah, 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 explosive. That's how we crimp or compress.

REP. SHAYS: I'm going to come back to -- Dr. Hamza, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

MR. HAMZA: The Iraqi program does include in its early stages when it was set up to go for the gun types so-called, what's been described here, gun type nuclear weapon. The African, 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 doesn't require very high sophistication in explosives. You can do it with much simpler explosives than the implosion device type.

The disadvantage is you need much more nuclear fissile material and in Iraq that's the problem. That's 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 is much more assured of working than the implosion device type.

The South African experience also presents another angle. The device needs no initiator, so-called neutron initiator. To get the two things together you need to fuse them, start the nuclear reaction with this called neutron initiator. It is so slow and big that the natural radiation will take care of that bleed. 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 inspectors is that Iraq has no initiators, it 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 in a large 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 sure 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 a terrorist -- this is an ideal terrorist weapon. Because what you need is simple explosives 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. So you could assemble it here in an apartment actually by a terrorist and use some simple explosive to slam them together and that's all it is.

REP. SHAYS: You know, in every hearing I learn new things, obviously. But my mind is working a mile a minute here and for obvious reasons. You're really answering two questions when I asked one. But what I wanted 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 like stake a bunch of logs but in this case it's highly radioactive material, put a bomb in it and you blow up and cause a nuclear explosion? That's the impression I get from Ms. Bryan's comments and I need to -- I just need to not lose my --

MR. BUNN: Can I just clarify that?

You're not going to get a nuclear explosion if you just drop a stick of dynamite onto a pile of highly enriched uranium. What Chris and what Danielle and Dr. Hamza have been describing is, taking a couple of pieces of highly enriched uranium and propelling them together, 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 shell 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 straight forward to do, if all you want is what a terrorist would like and want.

There's a huge difference that is important to understand between what a nation's state is going to want in terms of reliability, safety, confidence that it's going to go off and what a terrorist group is going to want. If a terrorist group, you know, if there's only a 50/50 chance they're going to be able to level midtown Manhattan, that's pretty good from their perspective. If there's a chance it will go off ahead of time that's, you know, unfortunate.

REP. SHAYS: Well and if you happen to be a suicide bomber and that it doesn't go off, you just keep working at it because no one necessarily knows you're doing it. What -- does this -- besides this basically softball size material not giving -- being something you actually can physically handle, does it -- but 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 Agency detection technologies for controlling borders and so on and I said, "You know, these little pagers that the Customs guys are always showing on TV that they can wear on their belt while they're searching the bag, if there was HEU in the bag, what's the probability one of those pagers would go off?" He said, "Zero."

REP. SHAYS: You know what, this is very important stuff.

MR. BUNN: Now there is other technology that's more effective for detecting the material but HEU is difficult to detect.

REP. SHAYS: Does anybody disagree with what's being said now? I mean is there a uniformity on this? Yes, okay. But, Ms. Bryan --

MS. BRYAN: I just wanted to --

REP. SHAYS: Yes?

MS. BRYAN: I just wanted to -- because you were asking specifically the question --

REP. SHAYS: Yeah. Let me just preface why I'm asking.

I got the impression from your statement that may not be as accurate and that is that a group of totally uneducated folk but willing to risk go up in smoke, could take over one of our facilities and with this highly enriched uranium or plutonium, cause a nuclear explosion. I'm hearing you still need a bomb and yet the impression I got from you is you don't need a bomb. So maybe you could clarify it then we'll go to Ms. Schakowsky.

MS. BRYAN: Right. I guess that's sort of two things if I heard what you were saying. The first is, I don't think they -- 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 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.

What was the second question?

REP. SHAYS: And would that be accurate from your standpoint, Mr. Bunn, or, Dr. Lee, or, Mr. Paine?

MR. BUNN: Well, 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 had they chosen to do so.

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. They slammed one piece into another piece and they essentially used the ground as the tamper, as a way of stopping the flying piece. So that was a pretty simple concept that they had.

REP. SHAYS: All right. Fair enough. It raises this point -- Ms. Bryan, I'm going to you. It raises the issue for me. I traveled with Senator -- former Senator Lugar to Russia, as I mentioned and we looked at chemical, biological and nuclear storage sites and I believe those two gentlemen deserve the Nobel Peace Prize because I mean, it took my breath away. You see a million shelves of chemicals which we are now destroying. Each one could 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 and wax so they could see if someone got in.

And then you go and you 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, 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 to be.

So, yeah, I'm pretty concerned about Iraq but I'm 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 don't know how you protect once a nuclear explosion happens. I don't know the antidote to that one.

She left.

REP. TIERNEY: We make her disappear every time it's my turn.

(Laughter.)

REP. SHAYS: You have the floor. Is she coming back?

REP. TIERNEY: I don't know if she's going to come back.

Ms. Bryan?

MS. BRYAN: Yes, sir.

REP. TIERNEY: 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.

REP. TIERNEY: I understand that you've interviewed a number of people involved in security at different plants. Will you tell me a little bit about what you learned from those interviews?

MS. BRYAN: Yes. What we found is that since September 11th, the guards are currently working six days a week, 12 hour shifts. So they are working 72 hours a week. So the first thing you're losing is any ability to frankly be awake or, you know, prepared for any such attack.

We found when we began our investigation that in any number of facilities, the guards were only given pistols and shotguns and in the last few months, they have started to get automatic -- semi-automatic weapons, rather in some of the facilities. But many of the guards -- in fact, nearly all the guards voiced specific concern that they're 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 two to three hours a year. So the familiarity with the weapon they are given, as inadequate as they are, they are not sure they would, in the heat of a panic, really know how to use the weapons anyway. And then we found -- what I found and I described in my testimony, the simple fact that no one has really, until in the last three 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 last three months, table top tests, it's the first time ever where the government has thought, "Well, how long would it take for a SWAT team to get there, to get the terrorists out?" They're finding, in table top tests, which I suspect are likely to be generous, it takes between one and two hours. And there's a chasm of time there that no one is doing anything.

REP. TIERNEY: What do you find out -- I've also heard about these table top tests and my understanding is that that's primarily what's being done now. They are running through these scenarios on table top exercise as opposed to real life exercise and drills. Is that what you found in most or all of the plants at this point in time?

MS. BRYAN: Well, they stopped all mock terrorists tests since September 11th. But prior to that, they were only occurring once every eight years at each facility. And what we found is because there is such a gigantic lack -- 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 would actually bring consultants in to get them ready, to get training.

They would be told in advance what kind of tests 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 there, were still failing those tests half the time.

REP. TIERNEY: These are commercial facilities, hiring private guards?

MS. BRYAN: Yes.

REP. TIERNEY: And training them or preparing them to some NRC, National Regulatory Commission, standards. So obviously those standards need to be reviewed.

MS. BRYAN: Well, they actually don't have -- I mean, there are no real standards imposed by the NRC on the quality of training. It's really been left up to the utilities subcontracted out to companies, primarily Wackenhut actually to provide these --

REP. TIERNEY: Say that again.

MS. BRYAN: Wackenhut, which is a, you know, commercial security company and they're the ones who set the standards. There aren't standards currently for training. They're working on fatigue rules, for example, for nuclear operators at the power plants. But they don't have fatigue rules for the guards.

REP. TIERNEY: So we have private concern hiring private or renting private police officers without any federal standards for what they have to do to be manned.

MS. BRYAN: Right.

REP. TIERNEY: And what they have to do to be trained to do that, what kind of equipment they have to have, how much 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 going on for that?

MS. BRYAN: In this case, it's definitely a bottom line issue where security costs money and it doesn't help them produce electricity. And so they do as little as they possibly can.

REP. TIERNEY: And if I read in -- Mr. Paine, you were talking about the HR4 earlier -- if I read HR4, 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, right?

MR. PAINE: Right. But it also involves -- the question involves the timing. One I can have a credible perspective on non- proliferation and stopping nuclear terrorism with the current nuclear deployment that we have. White water reactors are reasonably safeguardable. But the administration is proposing that we return to closing the fuel cycle and deploying breeder reactors and plutonium separation plants sometimes in the same facility and training a whole new generation in plutonium metallurgy and 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 because these facilities are hard to protect and have a spin-off of technological expertise that will find its way into illicit channels.

REP. TIERNEY: I guess it goes without saying that we still have not found what to do with the spent fuel at this point in time. Instead we leave it on site and try to protect it as best we can. What, Ms. Bryan, are we doing about that? What's the best protection that we could have and what is the level of protection that we do have in most plants right now for spent fuel?

MS. BRYAN: Well, you're certainly aware that there's 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 cask underground storage at the facilities, while addressing the bigger question of what to do with nuclear fuel -- spent fuel more generally. But there hasn't been a real push, so it's lying in these pools which are, as I said, in many cases uncontained.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. And then I guess just one question back on the Iraq situation, which I have to tell you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you having this hearing. But I found much of the testimony on Iraq to be very speculative here today on that, which I'm not sure is entirely helpful to getting people focused on what we ought to do in terms of United Nations 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 a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon? How far could they project any weapon that would cause destruction? Okay, because I think that's obviously -- I think that we're focusing here on one end. But I think that an important end of that is to realize that there's very limited capacity, to my knowledge in the hearings on that, for Iraq to actually get any type of a weapon from one point to another. The question I would have: is there anybody on the panel here who has 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'm not a huge expert on the Iraqi missile program or on 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.

REP. 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 any evidence of such plans. But I cannot certainly rule it out.

REP. TIERNEY: Well, we can't rule it out from Iran or Syria, Libya or any place, right?

MS. GOTTEMOELLER: Correct.

REP. TIERNEY: Provoked, however, Mr. Paine, you raise some interesting points on your testimony that even somebody not inclined in an unprovoked manner to use weapons that way might react differently once provoked. If you could go over that just a little bit more?

MR. PAINE: Right. Well, I was pointing out what I believe to be a serious flaw or contradiction in the administration's presentation of the issue. I don't know what the facts are. But the way it's been presented publicly is that Saddam Hussein simultaneously represents an imminent threat to our security which must be preemptively attacked. But he's not such a threat that he, while we're 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 invasion, but then they -- 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's a hypothetical, that it's a serious hypothetical but we have evidence that it currently exists, then there's time for the international inspection system to work. Or at least there's time for us to try to make it work and resort to violence later, rather than sooner.

On the other hand, if you think that 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. So I think, you know, members of Congress need to huddle with the intelligence community and with senior administration decision makers and look 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's a high risk scenario.

The way I resolve this contradiction is that basically the administration is engaging in over speak and exaggeration, and it wants to take advantage of the current war on terrorism and the kind of marshal atmosphere in the United States and around the globe to take out an old enemy, namely Iraq. And, you know, that may be a supportable goal, but it's a different kind of argument.

MR. BUNN: Could I just jump in --

REP. TIERNEY: Sure.

MR. BUNN: -- and support Chris on that point, in the sense that -- let's leave aside nuclear. For the moment Saddam Hussein, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified the other day, doesn't 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's had chemical and biological weapons for well over decade. If he was going to -- 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 at least that long. If he was going to give chemical and biological weapons to Al-Qaeda, wouldn't he have done it by now? It just doesn't make --

REP. TIERNEY: Well, certainly after 1991.

MR. BUNN: -- sense that this all of a sudden, after a decade after the Gulf War, is suddenly an imminent threat to the security of the 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 like what we're bent on doing.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. I'd like to thank all of you.

MR. HAMZA: Can I comment a little bit on this?

REP. SHAYS: Yes. I'm going to ask you some questions, but fire away.

MR. HAMZA: No, if it -- Saddam already have the deterrents, in terms of chemical and biological weapons, to prevent the U.S. from attacking for fear he might unleash some of it, then he won.

REP. SHAYS: Then he what?

MR. HAMZA: Then he already won.

REP. SHAYS: Yes.

MR. HAMZA: Then he already won the war, because this is exactly what he wants. I don't think he's going to attack the United States unprovoked in this sense, because -- especially in nuclear area. But that does not mean if he feels safe he is not going to terrorize the region and play the bully in the region, and that's his main goal. But there lies the U.S. interest. Is the U.S. 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 U.S. is already deterred, then what is going on in the future when he does get nuclear weapons? How is it going to get worse? I mean, how the situation will develop if he's -- if the U.S. 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? I mean, the idea is just to look into down the road what would happen.

REP. TIERNEY: Well, if I could just on that --

MR. HAMZA: Yeah, go ahead.

REP. TIERNEY: In fact, he's been deterred. I mean, he's had this biological and chemical weaponry since -- during 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.

MR. HAMZA: Against you, but what about --

REP. TIERNEY: -- in the sense of usual deterrence here, and that's what has been somewhat temporarily stabilizing the area. Now you're talking about going in and totally destabilizing it, not leaving him with any negotiable point out, not saying that we want weapons inspections and unless you have really high level weapons inspections that are enforced and open ended, we're going to do something.

You're saying whether or not you do that, we're going to have regime change, which I think many people interpret, probably rightly, as we're going to kill you. And at what point does he say, well, what do I have to gain from this exercise? I'm going to fire every gun in my bullet -- every bullet in my gun, rather?

MR. HAMZA: Who is deterred if the U.S. wouldn't go after him because he has them?

REP. TIERNEY: Well, I don't think that's the question. I think the United States has to have a reason to go after him that's 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 over the last century. Now, what more evidence you want of his aggressiveness and bad intentions?

REP. TIERNEY: Which --

MR. HAMZA: And he has the weapons now.

REP. TIERNEY: -- Would you (cross talk) the United States supported him against Iran?

MR. HAMZA: For a period when --

REP. TIERNEY: Obviously they had no reason to do anything then.

MR. HAMZA: Yeah, when Iraq was going to collapse, yes, they supported him because they didn't want the extension of the Islamic Republic. And we supported him too, for that matter. We were there. We didn't want the Islamic Republic to come in.

REP. SHAYS: I can't wait to jump in. But, Mr. Paine?

MR. PAINE: On just this point, I think it's a very important point for the kind of thing we're 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 dispositions. The Iraqis were using chemical weapons against Iranian Forces with the foreknowledge of the United States. We did not object. And this went on for two years, until they retook the Fao Peninsula.

So, you know, he may be a monster, but in the previous decade he was our monster and then suddenly he became someone else's monster. So, you know, I think --

REP. SHAYS: Mr. Paine --

MR. PAINE: -- the record of the United States government on this -- excuse me. I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman.

REP. SHAYS: No, no. I want you to continue.

MR. PAINE: The record of the United States government on this, if you view it over a period of decades, does not lend one 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 U.S. forces 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 or whether nuclear, chemical or biological have to be honestly discussed.

There's 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 feel entitled to attack and we don't feel deterred now and it's safe to attack him, then let's just say that. Let's just say that. Let's just say that he -- I think that 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.

REP. SHAYS: Let me -- I'm going to jump in, if I might.

MR. PAINE: At some point, with international support, the Iraqi people are going to turn against him.

REP. SHAYS: Yes. I happen to agree with you 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 the videotape of blowing up Kamisiyah 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 argued to us that our troops weren't exposed. And then 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 used in highly sensitive equipment. They were, you know, 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'm 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 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 are a lot of embarrassment to this. But embarrassment to me is no longer the issue. It shouldn't have been earlier. So I'm just going to say that to you.

But having said that to you, I do agree with Dr. Hamza. It is, in my dialogues with my constituents, 40 to one against in the letters and so on. They say if we do this, he'll do something terrible to us. And then I'm 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'd 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 that. I don't know how we deal with a nuclear. And so I just kind of 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. Now, one other thing, he has a weapon that will work. And one of the things though that I'm interested in is your opening comment. One bomb or two bombs is one thing. Ten or 20 or 30 is another. And then the question I wonder is, okay, once he has a nuclear weapon do we then say, okay, 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.

REP. SHAYS: I'm going to say we knew about it. I don't have any proof that we assisted, but maybe silence is assistance. But the second point is that we know he used it against his own people. And I do like the analogy that Dr. Baram used. He said sometimes he doesn't admit that he uses things, but we know he does and he has made a denial. I think it's foolish for anyone to accept right now that he said he -- 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.

Now, the other thing we do know, and I can't get into this because it's the one area that the administration has shared with people that I think is sensitive, and that is his delivery systems for certain weapons. Suffice it to say, we know he has delivery systems that others don't have. And it is alarming to me, his delivery systems, not necessarily for nuclear. So I guess what I'm wrestling with is when? But I do -- I'm agreeing with your point about the truth.

MR. PAINE: I mean, on this very point Iraq is one egregious case. Iraq is one egregious case. But how about the next egregious case? I mean, what if Syria --

REP. SHAYS: That's an easy answer --

MR. PAINE: Well --

REP. SHAYS: No, it is easy. If that's your question?

MR. PAINE: Yeah.

REP. SHAYS: You know why? Yeah, because we're not --

MR. PAINE: I mean, is this a future principle of foreign policy, or is this a one-off operation?

REP. SHAYS: Well, 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. Well, that went out the window. Anybody who suggests that it's going to be reactive, wait until they do it, containment, mutually assured destruction I think is -- I mean, that's just out of the line of --

MR. PAINE: But there are countries around --

REP. SHAYS: No, I'm just going to make the 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, well, what countries? We saw a change in 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 Libya becomes a problem. I ultimately think then it's containment of Iran.

REP. TIERNEY: Will the gentleman yield?

REP. SHAYS: Yep.

REP. TIERNEY: I think I understand what you're saying and I think you make some points, but I think you overstated a little bit when you talk about mutually assured destruction not working any longer, has gone away. You know, nuclear assured destruction between countries has not gone anywhere. You know, 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.

But what do we do to make sure that we preempt terrorist acts, and that means that we have to have international cooperation with a whole range of countries, some that have historically been our allies and some that have not. And then we have the 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 deterrents hasn't worked as between sovereign nations, and that seems to be a fairly regular thing there.

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 that we obviously need to go about that.

That's what I thought we were doing in Afghanistan, that's what I thought we've been doing since Afghanistan, although now some question about whether we're moving our focus off of that and going in on Iraq on a whole range of issues --

REP. SHAYS: Let me just speak to that.

REP. TIERNEY: And the last point of that is --

REP. SHAYS: Sure. And then you'll have a chance.

REP. TIERNEY: -- I've probably been privy to all of the classified hearings that you have on delivery systems and I don't see the same -- I mean, I don't think the United States is even marginally threatened by a delivery system from Iraq, and I think it would be a gross overstatement to say that.

REP. SHAYS: No. I'm not even suggesting that. And I do want to put in the record that we're talking about intercontinental ballistic, other delivery systems that are more regional.

We are -- and I'm saying this and then I'm happy to have your responses 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 that the -- 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.

MR. : Cleaning up.

REP. SHAYS: 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 the ballistic missile. But let me let you guys jump in.

MR. PAINE: Well, I just -- I have difficulties 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 you said --

REP. SHAYS: Can I back up for a sec? No, not just with Iraq, but preemption became -- we had to know the threat, we had to believe a strategy and we have to redevelop that strategy. Preemption became paramount in Afghanistan. That was preemptive.

MR. PAINE: Well, I think it was reactive then but we were attacked and then we attacked Afghanistan.

REP. SHAYS: No. 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'm just having difficulty if the idea is that we are going to deprive other countries of chemical and biological and nuclear deterrents. They haven't threatened us concretely, they have not attacked us. But nevertheless we feel uncomfortable about the possessions of these weapons and we're going to attack them. And we're going to attack them preemptively in future --

REP. SHAYS: I don't put Iraq in the same category as I put Holland.

MR. PAINE: No. How about Libya, Syria, Sudan? I mean, I'm just uncomfortable with Iraq as the opening gun of a policy --

REP. SHAYS: I said Holland. I was just being cute.

MR. PAINE: I just want to say that Libya was the first country to submit a warrant for Osama bin Laden's arrest to Interpol.

REP. SHAYS: Okay, 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: Yeah, but that was like back in 1997?

REP. SHAYS: What? What is '97?

MR. PAINE: I mean, the United States didn't. I mean --

REP. 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: Okay. All I'm just -- I'm just trying to point out that there is a class of countries that the president himself has identified the axis of evil. Two-thirds of 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? I mean, I --

REP. SHAYS: If they're not changing their behavior they would have to be.

REP. TIERNEY: I think the other valid point, if I could just get in for a second, is what if you take that theory and other countries decide that they're entitled to act as the United States, so that India decides that Pakistan is a bit if a nuisance and that preempts something there; in Russia, Chechnya; in China, Taiwan; right down the line.

REP. SHAYS: Let me just get Ms. Gottemoeller --

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 counter- proliferation. It was employed many times by the Clinton administration. Even prior to the Clinton administration, the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq was a very good example of a counter-proliferation preemptive strategy. The president's new national security strategy underscores the need to continue with counter-proliferation type preemptive attacks.

He also makes note, and I welcome this fact, of the need to employ nonproliferation diplomacy, the continuation of the nonproliferation 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, counter-proliferation 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 that is very negative indeed.

REP. 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 to 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.

REP. SHAYS: You know, 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: I mean, I can certainly --

REP. SHAYS: Now, I want to know, are you going to be on the fence on this or are you going to be kind of like --

(Laughter.)

MR. LEE: No, I got -- you have to understand where I'm coming from, Congressman.

REP. SHAYS: Are you going to search yourself and take a risk here/

MR. LEE: No. No. My comment simply involves it.

REP. SHAYS: Okay.

MR. LEE: 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 -- I mean, 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 miniscule biological capability.

I mean, where I find -- even though these countries may have some relationship with terrorists, harboring them, giving them political support, aid, succor, financing, in some cases transfers of conventional weaponry, as in the case of Iran transferring to the Palestinian Authority and to other groups, I find it very difficult to believe that a state with this kind of weaponry would feel comfortable providing terrorist groups with the means of mass destruction, which could be turned eventually against the state itself under certain circumstances. Except in the possible circumstance when that state's survival is threatened, in which case really I mean all bets could be off.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you. And I hope you weren't offended by my just having a little fun with you, because that's a very insightful comment.

MR. LEE: I'm having fun too, thank you.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you. There's a danger how long these hearings last, and I have to be careful.

Dr. Hamza, did you want to make a point?

MR. HAMZA: What we have is a system of --

REP. SHAYS: Your mike is not on.

MR. HAMZA: Sorry. What we have is a system of international inspection that's been, what, something like 50 years now. In the '50s it started, 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 non-proliferation treaty. There are 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 is 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, and reverted back to its old ways by more or less stopping the inspection process. By the way, it stopped it 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 weapon program, when he came too close to the inspectors and probably -- and actually asked for asylum. Dr. Nassar Hendow (ph).

So when the inspection process came realistic 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 even in the presence 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 -- these are rational actors. Not everybody is crazy there. These are -- they will look, examine and make their own decisions and if there is no action, their decision will be one way. If there is action, their decision will be another. So what we are looking at is the system, how it will evolve down the road.

Is 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 would Libya. Would Iraq pay for this, then the others will take another --

REP. SHAYS: I notice some of you are starting to look at the clock, and I don't blame you. I'm just going to just -- I want to talk a little about unilateral and I want to talk a little about the inspections, and I'm going to let you talk about anything you want to talk before we go there.

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 if they didn't fear that the United States was going to go in unilaterally? Is there anyone here? I mean, 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? Yes.

MS. GOTTEMOELLER: Mr. Chairman, I believe that what has happened in the past month or six 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 effecting of 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 coercive inspection as several of us have mentioned, as being a realistic option not only for finding out what's 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.

REP. 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 -- is there the 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, and anyone else?

MR. HAMZA: I want -- I have --

REP. SHAYS: I need your mike on.

MR. HAMZA: I'm sorry about that again. There is one test which I mentioned earlier for this. If Iraq allows unfettered access, it means allowed it, it has nothing to hide. It means allow the inspectors access to scientists, anywhere the inspectors want. And the inspectors -- everyone wanted it outside, but Iraq allowed that once and scientists of its own choice.

REP. SHAYS: But even that's a question mark, as you admit, because --

MR. HAMZA: Because?

REP. SHAYS: -- the families are still under his control.

MR. HAMZA: Yeah. And also if Iraq does not allow this -- and Iraq is already balking at this. It's saying that it will not allow the presidential site to 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, regime change will become the policy of the 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.

REP. SHAYS: Anybody else want to jump in, and then -- yes.

MR. BUNN: If I could just say one thing, and that is that 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 for him to --

REP. SHAYS: I agree with that.

MR. BUNN: -- accept the inspections. So it's my view that we have to be prepared to take yes for an answer.

REP. SHAYS: Provided they are truly unfettered.

MR. BUNN: Indeed.

REP. SHAYS: Scientists interviewed.

MR. BUNN: Indeed. I'm quite a fan of the coercive inspection concept that was put forward by the Carnegie -- where Ms. Gottemoeller works.

REP. SHAYS: Ms. Gottemoeller?

MS. GOTTEMOELLER: Sir, I just wanted to note -- and I agree with Dr. Hamza that what Saddam Hussein will be starting 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 is no way wriggle 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.

REP. SHAYS: Dr. Lee?

MR. LEE: Well, 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.

REP. SHAYS: Know what? I think we're going to end on that. Unless you want to, Mr. Paine (laughs) -- no, we will end on this. Did you want to make a comment first, Mr. Paine? Is there any question we should have asked? Any point that you wanted to make that should be a part of the record? And I will say some of the real gems we've got in this committee have been those last comments that people have wanted to make for the record. So 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 material submitted by Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts be inserted 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?

MR. PAINE: On the inspections question. I think there's a --

REP. SHAYS: Is your mike on? Okay.

MR. PAINE: I think from a longer term perspective, I think we have a stake -- all parties to this debate have a stake in vindicating 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 is security? And I think that's -- where at a kind of 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 is I find hard to imagine that the United States would be the nation that crystallizes this transformation in international affairs.

REP. SHAYS: I think the answer to your question, 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, 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 nightmares 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 to emphasize it.

One of the best kept secrets -- even though it's military, it's diplomatic as well. Forty 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 told. And 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. Anyone else?

MS. BRYAN: I just wanted to ask if you could -- I again wanted to remind you you asked last October for a GAO report on security at DoE facilities, and it's nearly a year and in a sense there's an urgency over this issue. I'd love you to sort of push them along a little.

REP. SHAYS: We will push them a lot. Thank you very much. Anyone else? You've been wonderful witnesses and very patient with our committee, and I hope you have a good lunch. Thank you very much.

(Adjourn)