WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush needs to upgrade U.S. efforts to secure loose Russian nuclear material, a new report says.
The report, entitled "The Race to Secure Russia's Loose Nukes," was produced by a joint task force headed by Brian Finlay of the Henry L. Stimson Center and Andrew Grotto of the Center for American Progress and was released Wednesday. It urged the president to offer "tailored incentives to existing (Russian) storage sites to give up their weapons materials and increase the scale of the current Material Controls and Conversion program to eliminate Russian nuclear materials to five tons per year.
The Bush administration should also "offer financial assistance to complete a comprehensive Russian inventory of (nuclear )weapons," the report said.
"This inventory should be followed by data exchanges between the United States and Russia and serve as a road map for the eventual elimination of those weapons as well as the secure storage and elimination of their composite materials," it said.
The report also recommended the elimination of up to 100 metric tons of Russia's excess plutonium by converting it into nuclear fuel for use in civilian reactors. It also recommended the storage of up to 100 metric tons of plutonium at the Mayak fissile materials storage facility and the halting of Russian production of plutonium.
