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use that as a basis to expand their activities and their intention 

 to use this facility to go beyond the 5,000 cubic meters to 15,000. 



All of this has been enormously successful in the sense that we 

 have completed the assessment stage. And while both Governments 

 or all three Governments, the Russian, the United States, and Nor- 

 way have from the data that are available, and it is not all the 

 data, at least some assurance that the containment of the radio- 

 active waste is not an immediate threat to the global food chain, 

 this project, in our judgment, is absolutely crucial in laying a foun- 

 dation for future work, and let me list a number of reasons why 

 I think this is the case, because, in essence, this is the core, I 

 think, of why this international cooperation is important and con- 

 tinues to be important. 



First, by means of this project, we are building trust with the 

 Russian Government, both in the civilian sector and in the military 

 sector, and I think that is extremely important in terms of just 

 being able to talk to each other and be able to discuss these issues 

 in an open way. 



The collaboration with Norway has been essentisd and lays the 

 groundwork for further expansion with other governments. We 

 have discussed the participation of Canada in this process and we 

 think that the more governments of the Arctic region that are in- 

 volved, the stronger will be the commitment to see this through to 

 the end. 



The ability to deal with the northern fleet has been one of the 

 real successes in terms of this project. We have had meetings with 

 the admiral and vice admiral of the northern fleet. They have indi- 

 cated to us, and we can give you a very nice report of their assess- 

 ment of the situation, their priorities, which will help us in future 

 planning. 



This is also a project which is now beginning to help us in terms 

 of experience of how we put together a project like this, a project 

 of design, construction, construction in Russia, which involves 

 many agencies and three governments. 



It is a project that addresses a specific problem with a result in 

 the end which leads to a policy decision, which has led to a policy 

 decision in the Russian Grovernment to use the facility on the mili- 

 tary side and to go beyond — go beyond — what we are able to do, 

 but to take on the responsibilities to expand it later. 



And finally, two other things. One, it is a model of how a number 

 of Government agencies have been able to pool their resources, pool 

 their authorities, and pool their interests together to accomplish 

 something as described here. I will not take time to lament with 

 you the difficulty, as I am sure you can imagine, there has been 

 to get these resources together, but without the leadership under 

 the Gore-Chernomyrdin process, which I think is a good example 

 of why that is a good mechanism, and just genuine cooperation on 

 the part of DOD and DOE and State and EPA to do this, I think 

 we would have not been able to put the resources together to do 

 the assessment stage and the resources to do the initial construc- 

 tion stage. 



I will be very frank with you in saying, of course, that what hap- 

 pens in the future is very uncertain in terms of where our budgets 

 are and in terms of what is available, but we have made effort to 



