Pentagon Launches New Nuke Agency

By Laura Myers
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, October 1, 1998; 3:10 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is launching a new agency to deal with modern-day threats of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, chemical and biological -- by consolidating Cold War-era agencies that focused mostly on keeping Moscow in line.

Creation of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency with the start of the new fiscal year today is part of Defense Secretary William Cohen's plan to streamline the Defense Department by reducing duplication and trimming its 130,000 work force by one-fifth in five years.

In this case, it does not look as if any jobs will be lost by combining the Defense Special Weapons Agency, the On-Site Inspection Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration. The new agency will have about 1,800 employees and a budget for fiscal year 1999 of $1.9 billion -- about the same as the current organizations.

Instead, Defense Department officials said the goal is to combine efforts of agencies that had been doing related work on nuclear and high-technology matters and to concentrate on the growing threat of developing weapons of mass destruction in nations outside the former Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991.

``We are asking this new agency to deal with threat reduction in the broadest sense,'' Jacques Gansler, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, said in July in announcing establishment of an outside expert committee to advise the agency.

``We want it to address every conceivable approach to reducing the threat from weapons of mass destruction -- to prevent the spread of these weapons, to deter their use, to protect against them if they are used, to identify who is responsible for such use and to support an appropriate response,'' Gansler said.

Iraq, Iran and North Korea head the list of U.S. concerns about secretive programs to develop so-called doomsday weapons that can kill many people at the same time.

John Pike, a security analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, applauded the Pentagon's move to have one agency deal with weapons threats at a time when many countries are thought to be developing weapons programs.

``This is a high-priority threat,'' Pike said.

Pike said, however, that the United States isn't addressing what he called ``the most broken part'' of U.S. attempts to track and respond to weapons development -- intelligence abilities to sift through information from many sources. The CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others don't work closely enough, he said.

The On-Site Inspection Agency was created to verify the breakthrough 1987 U.S.-Soviet treaty that eliminated an entire class of weapon -- land-based missiles with ranges between 310 miles and 3,410 miles. The organization also enforces the START I treaty signed in 1991 in which the two countries slashed nuclear arsenals by one-third to about 7,000 warheads each.

The Defense Special Weapons Agency is responsible for keeping track of the nation's nuclear weapons and calculating the effects of enemy atomic bombs. Before President Clinton signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the organization -- formerly the Defense Nuclear Agency -- was responsible for atomic testing.

The Defense Technology Security Administration's analysts are probably best known for recommending whether to allow export of sensitive technology to other countries, such as satellite sales to China and to Russia.

© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press