US Congressional Report on Global Security Presented at ISTC

On 25 March 2009, Anne Harrington, Director of the US Committee on International Security and Arms Control and Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, presented the Report Global Security Engagement: A New Model for Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) at the ISTC Headquarters. The audience included senior representatives and science attaches from most of the international embassies based in Moscow. The Report, ordered by the US Congress, provides recommendations on the future of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs that were created from the late 80s through the 90s to address problems related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The report stresses the need to “expand to other regions and fundamentally redesign CTR programs as an active tool of foreign policy that can address contemporary threats from groups that are agile, networked, and adaptable.” ISTC's role in managing CTR programs in Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States provided a backdrop to key elements of the Report, with ISTC Chairman, Dr. Ronald Lehman II, instrumental in the creation of the Report itself.

During the presentation, Director Harrington proposed that a CTR 2 program would need to deploy its activities outside of the Former Soviet Union, where new threats have appeared.

ISTC Executive Director, Adriaan van der Meer, responding to the Report commented that “The world has changed since the establishment of ISTC in 1994 as this report highlights. It is now the prime task to transform ISTC to today’s realities both with respect to threat reduction and the new scientific challenges."

The Report Global Security Engagement: A New Model for Cooperative Threat Reduction already received significant support from influential people in Washington such as US Senator Dick Lugar, co-author of the Nunn-Lugar program (1991), one of the core nonproliferation programs set after the collapse of the USSR. Senator Lugar hailed the report as a “critically important set of recommendations that should guide the Obama Administration’s efforts to expand the Nunn-Lugar Program around the world.”

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