How the GOP learned to love the bomb.

• Author: Bichsel, Amanda

The scene is Prague, whose beautiful churches and bridges were, almost miraculously, spared the ravages of two world wars. It is just before Christmas, and people are laughing and chatting on the streets as they do their last-minute shopping. Jaroslav Wagner, a retired nuclear scientist, starts the engine of his luxe blue Saab--conspicuous on this block of cheap Skodas--to make his delivery. He pulls out and speeds away. In his trunk is a metal canister, and in the canister are six pounds of highly enriched uranium, which is enough, in the hands of the right terrorists, to build a primitive nuclear weapon. Enough, that is, to ravage a city. Metty Christmas, Prague.

Sound like the latest from lan Fleming or John Le Carre? Try the newspaper. Wagner was apprehended last December.

Unfortunately, the Wagner case is not as unusual as you might think. The demise of the Soviet Union, and the rather abrupt end of the Cold War nuclear arms race, has left the East's sprawling nuclear infrastructure in chaos. Nuclear weapons of all kinds--and the enriched uranium and plutonium used to make them--are scattered about Russia and the newly independent states, and Russia is too broke and out of control to keep tabs on them. This, declares Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, is "the number one threat to American national security today."

Welcome to the fin de siecle, where nuclear overindulgence has, indeed, made us vulnerable --and where Republicans in our own Congress are about to make a bad situation worse.

In 1991, Senators Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, joined forces to deal with the Cold War's dangerous legacy. The "Nunn-Lugar" program, which began the next year, was designed to help dismantle nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S., and to help safeguard and account for leftover nuclear materials. So far in the former Soviet Union, with this American help, more than 2,800 nuclear warheads have been deactivated, 630 strategic launchers and bombers have been eliminated, and over 1,000 strategic Russian warheads that could be aimed at the U.S. are no longer deployed. Using

Amanda Bichsel is a Russia analyst for a foreign policy and defense consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Nunn-Lugar assistance, Russia will also fulfill its obligations under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) two years ahead of schedule, paving the way for further reductions. And do you remember when Ukraine refused to give up its nuclear weapons? Nunn-Lugar was critical in convincing Ukraine's leaders (as well as those of Kazakhstan and Belarus) to hand their weapons over to the Russians and promise not to build their own. All this for less then $400 million per year, less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the total defense budget.

But House Republicans, who plan to increase Pentagon spending by something approaching $10 billion this fiscal year, want to kill Nunn-Lugar. In February, $20 million was cut back from the program and the latest spending bill threatens to freeze all of its funding. While useless weapons systems are kept in production, this country is abandoning a crucial strategy for defending itself in the new world disorder: The threat today is less that Russia will invade Germany, but that the next Jaroslav Wagner might not be stopped--and that Prague '94 could just as easily be New York City '96.

Cleaning Up the Mess

The Cold War threw the two superpowers headlong into an arms race that would last almost 50 years, cost over $4 trillion in the U.S. alone, and leave both Russia and the U.S. with enormous nuclear weapons stockpiles. At last count, Russia had 25,000 weapons, while the U.S. weighed in at 14,000.

The problem now is what to do with them. Russia and the U.S. are dismantling their weapons at the rate of about 2,000 a year. But after the delivery system--the missile, or bomb, or whatever--has been demolished, the radioactive core of the weapon is still there. This highly enriched uranium or plutonium (known as "fissile material") cannot be easily destroyed. But it also can't be abandoned. The most difficult part of building a nuclear weapon, you see, is not putting the components together, but producing this fissile material, the bomb's crucial ingredient. It's a terrorist's...