Official speaks about new Russia

The Cold War has ended, breaking up the former Soviet Union, and leaving Russia and 14 neighboring states with 30,000 nuclear weapons, hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, and tens of thousands of metric tons of chemical warfare agent. To address this issue, and its possible ramifications for the U.S., Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter spoke at the Union League in Center City yesterday. "The world has been unhinged by the Cold War," Carter, a native of Philadelphia, said. "Russia and the destiny of Russia remain our central security problem. "Russia is in an on-going revolution and we don't know the outcome," he added. "We'd prefer a Russia that was internally democratic, with a free market economy and with freedom of the press and who is integrated with the rest of the world." He said that the worst case scenario would be a disintegrated Russia. "We support economic and political reform but, in the department of defense, we keep upper most in our minds, and I think all Americans should keep upper most in their minds, our security interests," he said. He also listed four particular security interests. The first was the United States' desire to have control over and ultimately destroy the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. He said the weapons were handled "like musical chairs. When the music stopped all the Soviet states kind of had what they had. "We have equipment in Russia for chopping up submarines, bombers, missiles, silos," he said. "We're building a storage facility for safe storage of plutonium." Currently, the United States has a research center that employs former Soviet weapon scientists to work on peace-time research. He said that they needed work after the break up of the Soviet Union, and, "we don't want them running off to Tripoli or Pyong Yang and building bombs." He also said that the United States now has the opportunity to dismantle the Soviet weapons arsenal. "We're trying as vigorously as we can to jump through that window before it closes," he said. Carter said the United States' second security interest was "controlling proliferation [of weapons] from the former U.S.S.R. outside the former U.S.S.R.: leakage, smuggling, and sales of destabilizing equipment." A third concern is economic and political stabilization within Russia and the other successor states. And fourth on Carter's list of priorities is to avoid "the reflexive, zero sum, global rivalry" that existed during the Cold War, during which the Soviet Union acted as a "spoiler" and a "check" to the United States. However, he said the future of Russia is still unclear and the United States is trying to structure its policy so American security is "protected no matter what." The Department of Defense is currently planning to "engage" parties in the successor states who are "willing to work with the U.S. in the common pursuit of activities that serve our security." Carter used the covert operation, Project Sapphire, as an example of such successful engagement. The project was formed in response to 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium found in Kazakhstan. "Their first conclusion was: we shouldn't have it," he said. "Somebody cared about their security and felt they didn't need nuclear weapons, [and] Kazakhstan came to the United States first." American officials canned up the material in special containers and flew it back to the U.S. on C-5 transport planes and drove it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Carter said. At 8:00 a.m. the following day, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry announced on television that this material -- which was "much more than Saddam Hussein would have ever dreamed of getting, was safe."