so this story begins 26 years ago when
the Soviet Union fell apart and along
with it control over the largest arsenal
of nuclear chemical and biological
weapons ever created it was uncharted
and perilous waters
and as the Soviet Union fell apart two
visionary senators Sam Nunn from Georgia
and your own senator Dick Lugar from
Indiana passed legislation called the
nunn-lugar act that established the
Cooperative Threat Reduction program to
help us deal with this new challenge not
of a strong Soviet Union threatening the
United States but a weak collapsed state
perhaps unable to prevent the theft or
diversion of weapons of mass destruction
and the related materials and expertise
I was a young diplomat
and I was flying home from Germany and I
read an article in The Wall Street
Journal and it said American Embassy
Kazakhstan
looking for diplomats who find Paris a
bore and it was an article about how
this new country called Kazakhstan
had inherited over 1200 nuclear weapons
it had become the fourth-largest
possessor of nuclear weapons in the
world and I thought what an exciting
opportunity for me so I volunteered to
go there I had been working on
countering Libya’s
weapons of mass destruction programs in
my prior assignment so this seemed like
a great opportunity so here I am
after learning Russian language for one
year
arriving in 1993
in Almaty Kazakhstan in the tension or
heavenly mountains
in really uncharted waters in a new
country and we hadn’t mapped the
locations of these weapons of mass
destruction the facilities were
scattered across 11 time zones in the
most isolated remote areas
many of these cities didn’t appear on
maps they were just known by post office
box numbers they were so secret
and shortly after I arrived in
Kazakhstan I had been there for
month or so I was approached by my car
mechanic and he asked me if I would be
interested in buying some uranium
so there were a lot of scams going on at
the time and I was very skeptical but
how can you not follow up something like
this so I I pursued it and my
relationship with him led to an
introduction to the director of a
factory in East Kazakhstan near the
border with Mongolia China and Russia
his name was Vitaly met a
and I became good friends with him and
he invited me elk hunting in the Altai
mountains and we bonded and over a
period of several months he gave me
increasingly more information about this
uranium that had been left over in his
factory from a secret Soviet nuclear
submarine reactor program and indeed
eventually
I learned through him that Kazakhstan
had inherited in this warehouse enough
highly enriched uranium to produce
dozens and dozens of nuclear weapons we
were invited by President Nazarbayev on
a secret visit to this facility to to
verify the presence of this material and
here is just one of many buckets filled
with this heavy metal its uranium
enriched to 90 percent uranium-235
immediately weapons-usable
and this was all protected by a good
padlock and we reported that back to
Washington what to do what to do this
was uncharted waters
and together with the government of
Kazakhstan the government of the United
States took a bold gamble and we decided
to launch a secret project together to
safely package these materials and fly
them back to the United States for
safekeeping why because we were
concerned that countries like Iran Iraq
Libya Syria and even North Korea
seeking these materials
throughout the former Soviet Union and
we wanted to get it out of there
and so we launched this project in a
secret and I remember let yesterday
after we had spent
five weeks packaging the material and
then loading it on to these trucks when
it was most vulnerable for the movement
to the airport at 3 o’clock in the
morning and we were racing against
winter that night the roads had black
ice on them and these trucks that you
see in this convoy I was in the lead
security vehicle as part of an armed
escort
they were sliding on the black ice and I
shuddered to think that I would have to
report to Washington that one of these
trucks had slid off a bridge into the
air teach River and was floating
downstream but luckily that didn’t
happen we made it safely to the airport
and loaded to c5 galaxy aircraft or one
of their longest flights in history
literally halfway around the planet back
to the United States without any stops
with three aerial refueling in route and
when this project was completed when the
material was safely secured in Oak Ridge
Tennessee we announced to the world this
accomplishment
it was truly defense by other means
one of the largest intelligence failures
of the Cold War was that we missed the
Soviet biological weapons program we
signed a treaty with them in other
countries in 1975 the biological weapons
convention and as the ink was drying on
that treaty the Soviet Union decided to
ramp up its biological weapons program
and this building here that I’m standing
from in front of is in a place called
step Nagurski Kazakhstan it was one of
those secret cities that was never on a
map
and that building
two football fields long it was the
world’s largest anthrax Factory and we
were invited by President Nazarbayev to
make a secret visit to this facility and
I led the first American team there in
June of 1995 and confronted with this
what to do we didn’t have a playbook
these were uncharted waters so what we
did with the approval of the government
of Kazakhstan we signed a contract with
the very people who built this facility
and operated this facility to destroy it
safely and methodically
here is one of ten four-story high for
mentors bioreactors the entire
fermentation hall was at biosafety level
four high containment the workers wore
spacesuits with breathable air this
facility was capable of producing during
a wartime mobilization period of about
eight months of 300 metric tons of
anthrax
Gale can only be called evil but thanks
to the nunn-lugar program and our
partnership with the government of
Kazakhstan that decided to reject
weapons of mass destruction if you were
to go there today
you would just see grass growing where
that horrific building once stood
this is an island in the RLC called
Basra’s Dania Island that we visited in
June of 1995 it was the site of the
Soviet Union’s open-air biological
weapons testing facility they would in
one test expose about a hundred monkeys
or other animals to biological weapons
agents and then bring them back into
high containment laboratories to observe
the onset of disease and evaluate the
effectiveness of their biological
weapons
the Soviet Army we learned from a
defector had buried over a hundred tons
of anthrax agent in 11 pits on this
island and after 9/11 we became
concerned that this could be recovered
by terrorist groups like al-qaeda
so we did a joint project with the
government of Uzbekistan to dig up these
pits and thoroughly decontaminate and
destroy what had remained of this
anthrax agent
so that was another example of of
dealing with the legacy of these threats
in a way that permanently eliminated the
threat Here I am in Kiev Ukraine with a
brand new junior senator from Illinois
it’s at a public health laboratory and
he looks concerned and it’s because from
this kitchen like refrigerator behind me
the director of the health lab ANDed me
this tray with vials of bacillus
anthracis that’s the bacteria that
causes anthrax and we mapped many
facilities like this throughout the
Soviet Union we were concerned that
groups like al-qaeda and later Isis
could get their hands on these seed
materials starter cultures to develop
biological weapons for terrorists
attacks and we we had a big program to
consolidate and secure these dangerous
pathogen collections some of which had
been left over from the Soviet
biological weapons program now we’re
very concerned not just about these
traditional biological weapons but that
advances in science and synthetic
biology and gene editing make it
possible to develop novel enhanced
pathogens as biological weapons and
countries like North Korea although we
don’t hear about it because the news is
dominated by their nuclear weapons and
missile programs they have been applying
these new scientific tools to developing
more deadly biological weapons and we
need to pay attention to this I believe
it’s perhaps more likely that they would
use biological weapons than nuclear
weapons because they could do it with a
big leaf of denial
chemical weapons are also a threat last
month
President Putin announced that Russia
had completed the destruction of the
Cold War chemical weapons arsenal of 40
thousand tons of chemical weapons what
he failed to mention was that the
nunn-lugar program was about a billion
dollars of your tax dollars built a
facility in Russia in a place called Shu
Qi that destroyed a large portion and
helped Russia destroy a large portion of
that Cold War arsenal
in Libya which I had worked on in the
late 1980s and early 1990s I had the
opportunity to visit a remote location
deep inside of Libya at a place called
WA Don and I’m holding there the last of
517 artillery shells that were filled
with mustard gas that could have been
used by terrorists as an improvised
chemical device I had the pleasure of
flying back by helicopter and then
fixed-wing to Tripoli that day and I was
pulled aside by the lead chemical
engineer
said Andy he said today’s the proudest
day of my life and I said why he said
since the mid-1980s I was hired to work
on Gaddafi’s chemical weapons program I
helped build the factories and produce
these chemical weapons and today I had
the honor of leading the project to
destroy the last of them and these
weapons will never fall into the hands
of terrorists and it’s people like him
or the real champions of this effort and
I learned in my career that it’s
individuals who make projects like this
happen they don’t just happen because
bureaucracies say we should do this you
really need champions I’m also very
concerned about fentanyl’s
the president today announced that it’s
a public health emergency the opioid
crisis but what people don’t realize is
that fentanyl’s are also a chemical
weapon it could be used by terrorists in
fact in 2004 in Moscow Chechen
terrorists seized a theater like this
Special Forces
through the air handling system inserted
fentanyl’s
and they used too much they killed all
40 hostage takers but also they killed
over a hundred of the hostages
themselves
so fentanyl’s are not just a health
threat
but they’re a national security concern
and this is truly a new uncharted water
that going forward we need to pay close
attention to we also had an amazing
project with over 30 countries involved
including the United Nations to remove
and destroy 1,300 tons of serious
chemical weapons and that was
accomplished
with leadership from the department of
defense technology developed by the US
Department of Defense but a true
partnership
between Russia the United States China
and European countries
and that’s 1300 tons of chemical weapons
that will never be used against the
Syrian people
we’ll never be acquired by terrorists
like Isis and we’ll never present a
strategic threat to Syria’s neighbors
nuclear weapons
think they went away with the Cold War
we still have in the world 15,000
nuclear weapons many of them over a
hundred times more powerful than the two
that were dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki to end World War two
unfortunately I believe that we’re at as
much risk if not even greater risk of an
accidental nuclear war today and even
during the Cold War and this is
something that is really uncharted
waters very dangerous that your
generation is going to have to deal with
President Obama moved the ball on this
with his Prague speech where he laid out
a vision of a world free of nuclear
weapons but it’s going to take a lot of
work and I believe that we’re at the
tipping point of a possible new nuclear
weapons arms race not just involving two
countries but involving many more
countries that currently possess nuclear
weapons so
I have a
Qwest of you and it’s based on
that I’ve had and working on these
programs and reducing weapons of mass
destruction threats and I would ask each
of you
sitter
whether you’re an aspiring scientist
develop new drugs and vaccines to
prevent biological weapons or an
aspiring journalist or an aspiring
public servant to consider carrying on
this work
to prevent catastrophe to prevent
weapons of mass destruction because as
President Obama said we simply
cannot allow the 21st century to be
darkened by the worst weapons of the
20th century
you
the Soviet Union fell apart and along
with it control over the largest arsenal
of nuclear chemical and biological
weapons ever created it was uncharted
and perilous waters
and as the Soviet Union fell apart two
visionary senators Sam Nunn from Georgia
and your own senator Dick Lugar from
Indiana passed legislation called the
nunn-lugar act that established the
Cooperative Threat Reduction program to
help us deal with this new challenge not
of a strong Soviet Union threatening the
United States but a weak collapsed state
perhaps unable to prevent the theft or
diversion of weapons of mass destruction
and the related materials and expertise
I was a young diplomat
and I was flying home from Germany and I
read an article in The Wall Street
Journal and it said American Embassy
Kazakhstan
looking for diplomats who find Paris a
bore and it was an article about how
this new country called Kazakhstan
had inherited over 1200 nuclear weapons
it had become the fourth-largest
possessor of nuclear weapons in the
world and I thought what an exciting
opportunity for me so I volunteered to
go there I had been working on
countering Libya’s
weapons of mass destruction programs in
my prior assignment so this seemed like
a great opportunity so here I am
after learning Russian language for one
year
arriving in 1993
in Almaty Kazakhstan in the tension or
heavenly mountains
in really uncharted waters in a new
country and we hadn’t mapped the
locations of these weapons of mass
destruction the facilities were
scattered across 11 time zones in the
most isolated remote areas
many of these cities didn’t appear on
maps they were just known by post office
box numbers they were so secret
and shortly after I arrived in
Kazakhstan I had been there for
month or so I was approached by my car
mechanic and he asked me if I would be
interested in buying some uranium
so there were a lot of scams going on at
the time and I was very skeptical but
how can you not follow up something like
this so I I pursued it and my
relationship with him led to an
introduction to the director of a
factory in East Kazakhstan near the
border with Mongolia China and Russia
his name was Vitaly met a
and I became good friends with him and
he invited me elk hunting in the Altai
mountains and we bonded and over a
period of several months he gave me
increasingly more information about this
uranium that had been left over in his
factory from a secret Soviet nuclear
submarine reactor program and indeed
eventually
I learned through him that Kazakhstan
had inherited in this warehouse enough
highly enriched uranium to produce
dozens and dozens of nuclear weapons we
were invited by President Nazarbayev on
a secret visit to this facility to to
verify the presence of this material and
here is just one of many buckets filled
with this heavy metal its uranium
enriched to 90 percent uranium-235
immediately weapons-usable
and this was all protected by a good
padlock and we reported that back to
Washington what to do what to do this
was uncharted waters
and together with the government of
Kazakhstan the government of the United
States took a bold gamble and we decided
to launch a secret project together to
safely package these materials and fly
them back to the United States for
safekeeping why because we were
concerned that countries like Iran Iraq
Libya Syria and even North Korea
seeking these materials
throughout the former Soviet Union and
we wanted to get it out of there
and so we launched this project in a
secret and I remember let yesterday
after we had spent
five weeks packaging the material and
then loading it on to these trucks when
it was most vulnerable for the movement
to the airport at 3 o’clock in the
morning and we were racing against
winter that night the roads had black
ice on them and these trucks that you
see in this convoy I was in the lead
security vehicle as part of an armed
escort
they were sliding on the black ice and I
shuddered to think that I would have to
report to Washington that one of these
trucks had slid off a bridge into the
air teach River and was floating
downstream but luckily that didn’t
happen we made it safely to the airport
and loaded to c5 galaxy aircraft or one
of their longest flights in history
literally halfway around the planet back
to the United States without any stops
with three aerial refueling in route and
when this project was completed when the
material was safely secured in Oak Ridge
Tennessee we announced to the world this
accomplishment
it was truly defense by other means
one of the largest intelligence failures
of the Cold War was that we missed the
Soviet biological weapons program we
signed a treaty with them in other
countries in 1975 the biological weapons
convention and as the ink was drying on
that treaty the Soviet Union decided to
ramp up its biological weapons program
and this building here that I’m standing
from in front of is in a place called
step Nagurski Kazakhstan it was one of
those secret cities that was never on a
map
and that building
two football fields long it was the
world’s largest anthrax Factory and we
were invited by President Nazarbayev to
make a secret visit to this facility and
I led the first American team there in
June of 1995 and confronted with this
what to do we didn’t have a playbook
these were uncharted waters so what we
did with the approval of the government
of Kazakhstan we signed a contract with
the very people who built this facility
and operated this facility to destroy it
safely and methodically
here is one of ten four-story high for
mentors bioreactors the entire
fermentation hall was at biosafety level
four high containment the workers wore
spacesuits with breathable air this
facility was capable of producing during
a wartime mobilization period of about
eight months of 300 metric tons of
anthrax
Gale can only be called evil but thanks
to the nunn-lugar program and our
partnership with the government of
Kazakhstan that decided to reject
weapons of mass destruction if you were
to go there today
you would just see grass growing where
that horrific building once stood
this is an island in the RLC called
Basra’s Dania Island that we visited in
June of 1995 it was the site of the
Soviet Union’s open-air biological
weapons testing facility they would in
one test expose about a hundred monkeys
or other animals to biological weapons
agents and then bring them back into
high containment laboratories to observe
the onset of disease and evaluate the
effectiveness of their biological
weapons
the Soviet Army we learned from a
defector had buried over a hundred tons
of anthrax agent in 11 pits on this
island and after 9/11 we became
concerned that this could be recovered
by terrorist groups like al-qaeda
so we did a joint project with the
government of Uzbekistan to dig up these
pits and thoroughly decontaminate and
destroy what had remained of this
anthrax agent
so that was another example of of
dealing with the legacy of these threats
in a way that permanently eliminated the
threat Here I am in Kiev Ukraine with a
brand new junior senator from Illinois
it’s at a public health laboratory and
he looks concerned and it’s because from
this kitchen like refrigerator behind me
the director of the health lab ANDed me
this tray with vials of bacillus
anthracis that’s the bacteria that
causes anthrax and we mapped many
facilities like this throughout the
Soviet Union we were concerned that
groups like al-qaeda and later Isis
could get their hands on these seed
materials starter cultures to develop
biological weapons for terrorists
attacks and we we had a big program to
consolidate and secure these dangerous
pathogen collections some of which had
been left over from the Soviet
biological weapons program now we’re
very concerned not just about these
traditional biological weapons but that
advances in science and synthetic
biology and gene editing make it
possible to develop novel enhanced
pathogens as biological weapons and
countries like North Korea although we
don’t hear about it because the news is
dominated by their nuclear weapons and
missile programs they have been applying
these new scientific tools to developing
more deadly biological weapons and we
need to pay attention to this I believe
it’s perhaps more likely that they would
use biological weapons than nuclear
weapons because they could do it with a
big leaf of denial
chemical weapons are also a threat last
month
President Putin announced that Russia
had completed the destruction of the
Cold War chemical weapons arsenal of 40
thousand tons of chemical weapons what
he failed to mention was that the
nunn-lugar program was about a billion
dollars of your tax dollars built a
facility in Russia in a place called Shu
Qi that destroyed a large portion and
helped Russia destroy a large portion of
that Cold War arsenal
in Libya which I had worked on in the
late 1980s and early 1990s I had the
opportunity to visit a remote location
deep inside of Libya at a place called
WA Don and I’m holding there the last of
517 artillery shells that were filled
with mustard gas that could have been
used by terrorists as an improvised
chemical device I had the pleasure of
flying back by helicopter and then
fixed-wing to Tripoli that day and I was
pulled aside by the lead chemical
engineer
said Andy he said today’s the proudest
day of my life and I said why he said
since the mid-1980s I was hired to work
on Gaddafi’s chemical weapons program I
helped build the factories and produce
these chemical weapons and today I had
the honor of leading the project to
destroy the last of them and these
weapons will never fall into the hands
of terrorists and it’s people like him
or the real champions of this effort and
I learned in my career that it’s
individuals who make projects like this
happen they don’t just happen because
bureaucracies say we should do this you
really need champions I’m also very
concerned about fentanyl’s
the president today announced that it’s
a public health emergency the opioid
crisis but what people don’t realize is
that fentanyl’s are also a chemical
weapon it could be used by terrorists in
fact in 2004 in Moscow Chechen
terrorists seized a theater like this
Special Forces
through the air handling system inserted
fentanyl’s
and they used too much they killed all
40 hostage takers but also they killed
over a hundred of the hostages
themselves
so fentanyl’s are not just a health
threat
but they’re a national security concern
and this is truly a new uncharted water
that going forward we need to pay close
attention to we also had an amazing
project with over 30 countries involved
including the United Nations to remove
and destroy 1,300 tons of serious
chemical weapons and that was
accomplished
with leadership from the department of
defense technology developed by the US
Department of Defense but a true
partnership
between Russia the United States China
and European countries
and that’s 1300 tons of chemical weapons
that will never be used against the
Syrian people
we’ll never be acquired by terrorists
like Isis and we’ll never present a
strategic threat to Syria’s neighbors
nuclear weapons
think they went away with the Cold War
we still have in the world 15,000
nuclear weapons many of them over a
hundred times more powerful than the two
that were dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki to end World War two
unfortunately I believe that we’re at as
much risk if not even greater risk of an
accidental nuclear war today and even
during the Cold War and this is
something that is really uncharted
waters very dangerous that your
generation is going to have to deal with
President Obama moved the ball on this
with his Prague speech where he laid out
a vision of a world free of nuclear
weapons but it’s going to take a lot of
work and I believe that we’re at the
tipping point of a possible new nuclear
weapons arms race not just involving two
countries but involving many more
countries that currently possess nuclear
weapons so
I have a
Qwest of you and it’s based on
that I’ve had and working on these
programs and reducing weapons of mass
destruction threats and I would ask each
of you
sitter
whether you’re an aspiring scientist
develop new drugs and vaccines to
prevent biological weapons or an
aspiring journalist or an aspiring
public servant to consider carrying on
this work
to prevent catastrophe to prevent
weapons of mass destruction because as
President Obama said we simply
cannot allow the 21st century to be
darkened by the worst weapons of the
20th century
you
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