49 



context from Russia. The end result of the negotiation of that pro- 

 posal was this agreement which was reached and signed by Vice 

 President Gore in December 1994. 



We certainly did not accept the first Russian draft. It was a draft 

 that contained no particular commitment on Russia's part to do 

 anything in particular and it has us essentially funding everything. 

 I think that if we had accepted this, we would have been criticized. 



We wanted an agreement that gave us access to important areas 

 that we thought that our scientists needed access to and we wanted 

 recognition that cooperation was a two-way street and we also 

 wanted recognition that other contaminants, and others, I think, on 

 these panels following us will go into the fact that other contami- 

 nants may be of, at least in the near term, even higher importance 

 than the radioactive waste. We feel that we got that in the agree- 

 ment that was finally reached. 



Multilaterally, we continued to stress the Arctic Monitoring and 

 Assessment Program as one of the key components of the Arctic en- 

 vironmental protection strategy. There is, as well, the Barents 

 Council, a Norwegian initiative, and ongoing discussions of an Arc- 

 tic Council that has been proposed by Canada. 



Mr. Chairman, all of these are relatively new international ini- 

 tiatives and I must confess some concern about our ability to lead 

 as we confront the funding and personnel constraints in front of us. 

 Moreover, I must also note that the Arctic has become a bit of a 

 fad. We need to guard against a proliferation of meetings, of insti- 

 tutionalization of new bureaucracies associated with Arctic coopera- 

 tion and new initiatives which simply sap our strength and our re- 

 sources and keep us from really accomplishing much. 



Dr. Yablokov mentioned that he thought that the London Con- 

 vention might be reconfigured to also deal with land-based sources 

 of pollution. That, of course, goes outside of the mandate of the 

 present convention and it is an area in which the administration, 

 again, exercised leadership on in hosting a conference here in 

 Washington just at the end of October on land-based marine pollu- 

 tion, including radioactive waste from land-based sources and de- 

 veloped a program of action in that connection, and we feel that 

 that is the better vehicle through which to pursue international co- 

 operation on land-based activities that pollute the marine environ- 

 ment 



Finally, Mr. Chairman, on the research front, a great deal has 

 been accomplished since 1993. Only since 1991 have our scientists 

 begun to share data and to conduct collaborative research in the 

 north of Russia, where the land and the river and the sea and the 

 ocean pollution have international implications. Only in the last 2 

 years have joint Norwegian and Russian cruises investigated dump 

 sites in the Barents and Kara Seas. Assessment of these and other 

 findings in the International Arctic Seas Assessment Project of the 

 IAEA are now beginning to be published. Joint cruises have also 

 taken place off Russia's far east coast. 



With funds supplied to the U.S. Defense Department, the Arctic 

 Nuclear Waste Assessment Program during fiscal years 1993 

 through 1995, we have for the first time studies from a variety of 

 areas, including in the Ob and Yenisey Rivers, which drain into the 

 Arctic. 



