Cooperative Threat Reduction

Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller today called the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program "a model for how an interagency team should operate."

Speaking at a forum on the CTR program at the National Defense University, Gottemoeller said when the effort "was first beginning to take off" in the early 1990s, "it was during that period that we first understood that we had to have a profoundly interagency effort in order to advance these programs and get them cemented in place." Further:

You can imagine the challenge in terms of dealing with very disparate countries who were going through extremely complicated political, security and economic transitions themselves, but our own national government was not really organized at the time to work in this way together, and so a pattern . . . of working [together] was established way back at the outset of these programs in 1992, 1993 and going forward, because it was absolutely necessary to hang together, otherwise we never would have been able to, I think, put the pieces together and work successfully with our Congress which was extraordinarily important [as was] the continuing engagement of Sen. [Sam] Nunn and Sen. [Richard] Lugar was very beneficial from that point of view.

But that's a . . . tradition . . . that was well established and continues to this day, so when I said, we're synced up among State, Energy and Defense -- and by the way, very much with the national security staff in the White House leading the way -- it is because it is a well-established tradition that has proven its worth, and we know that as we face new challenges going forward, we're absolutely going to have to have priorities set, and a clear vision as a national government as to how we want to proceed.

So I would say it's based on sound experience and it's also based on our now very real recognition of the challenges that ensue from trying to continue to advance these very, well, productive but in many ways innovative programs. At every point along the way, you are innovating your interactions with your governments, figuring out how to work the particular challenges of individual projects, and you're also innovating and thinking about how to get the resources of our national government to work most effectively together, and oh by the way, I see many individuals here from our national laboratories as well, who are always very important in both the creative aspects in thinking about how a project should be formulated but also in terms of their implementation.