Non-Proliferation

If the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration take effect at the end of this week there will be “permanent damage” to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation efforts, NNSA acting Administrator Neile Miller told the House Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee yesterday. “Even with reprogramming authority, which again we must have if sequestration were to […]

A decommissioned medical irradiator containing material that could be used to construct a dirty bomb has been removed from Temple University’s Old Medical School Building by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, the agency said yesterday. The irradiator was used for medical research for nearly two decades, but when it was recently […]

Russia has signaled that it does not want to extend the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction with the United States beyond 2013, suggesting it needs a “more modern” legal framework. Among the threat reduction work for which it is credited, the program has been responsible for the deactivation of 7,610 Russian strategic nuclear warheads, the destruction […]

The United States and the international community quickly condemned a nuclear test by North Korea yesterday, the country’s third such nuclear detonation in seven years. North Korea’s KCNA news service said the country detonated a “miniaturized” nuclear device that the U.S. Geological Survey said registered as a 5.1 magnitude seismic event. Experts estimated the yield […]

Sealed sources and other radiological materials that could be used to create a dirty bomb remain unsecure at nearly 80 percent of high-risk hospitals and medical facilities across the U.S., a new Government Accountability Office report concludes. The GAO review was triggered to follow up on post-9/11 safety measures. However, more than a decade after […]

The White House on Monday formally nominated Rose Gottemoeller to serve as the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, reaffirming her spot in a role that she has filled in an acting capacity since earlier this year. Gottemoeller replaced Ellen Tauscher as the State Department’s top arms control official while remaining […]

On the sixteenth anniversary of the first signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a panel of nuclear test monitoring experts yesterday emphasized that advances in technology in recent years have addressed many of the technical obstacles to ratifying the treaty in the United States. “Technical issues, yes, have been favorably resolved,” Richard Garwin, […]

Gottemoeller also emphasized the importance of full funding for nuclear weapons modernization. A lack of funding for modernization and stockpile stewardship could be a roadblock to ratification of the treaty, which failed in the Senate 12 years ago. “We’ve got a very complicated situation on Capitol Hill right now with the so-called fiscal cliff approaching,” […]

State Department arms control chief Rose Gottemoeller is headed to Europe today for a two-week trip focused on nonproliferation, including talks in Moscow Sept. 7-8. Gottemoeller, the acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, will also visit Geneva, Helsinki, Oslo, and The Hague before heading to Moscow for meetings with senior […]

The comments aren’t likely to spark any new negotiations (for now), but Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signaled that Moscow would be open to further nuclear reduction talks beyond the 1,550-warhead ceiling established by the New START Treaty—as long as those talks involve U.S. missile defenses and other thorny issues. However, given the looming […]

Though the National Nuclear Security Administration is committed to a global transition to producing medical isotopes with low-enriched uranium, it is seeking permission to export highly-enriched uranium to a Canadian company to make the isotopes. In an application filed July 30 and made public this week, NNSA is seeking permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission […]

A group of 19 organizations are calling on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to undertake a formal nuclear proliferation assessment on GE-Hitachi’s proposed Global Laser Enrichment plant in North Carolina before granting it an operating license. The NRC is in the final stages of licensing the plant, and is expected to make a decision later this […]

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty needs to be fixed, and a senior nuclear nonproliferation expert laid out a five-part plan for strengthening the landmark treaty that includes consequences for countries that withdraw from the pact, more invasive inspections and nuclear reductions for all countries: not just the U.S. and Russia. And failing improvement, former Nuclear Regulatory […]

Though half of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s corporate partners have stalled or dropped out of an effort to jump-start the domestic U.S. supply of a key medical isotope, a Department of Energy Inspector General report released yesterday reported that progress is being made and agency officials believe the program’s objectives can still be met. […]

A pair of experts yesterday urged the Obama Administration to put the brakes on future reductions to the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, suggesting at a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing that such moves would have little impact on nonproliferation and efforts to dissuade Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons. “There is […]

The Senate Armed Services Committee has completed its work on the FY2013 Defense Authorization Act, but the panel’s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee is still planning to hold a hearing on proliferation prevention programs at the NNSA and Department of Defense. Madelyn Creedon, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, will testify before […]

President Barack Obama and new Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to continue “discussions on strategic stability” in a joint statement released yesterday after their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Mexico. In a wide-ranging statement that touched on most of Obama’s nuclear security agenda, the leaders also agreed to successfully implement the […]

The Obama Administration expects that two Russian research reactors currently using highly enriched uranium will be converted to use low-enriched uranium by 2014, according to a statement released yesterday by the National Nuclear Security Administration. In a joint statement yesterday, the U.S. and Russia said that joint studies by the Department of Energy and Rosatom […]

The House late last week passed the “Nuclear Terrorism Conventions Implementation and Safety of Maritime Navigation Act of 2012,” a bill necessary for U.S. implementation of two international treaties aimed at curbing nuclear terrorism. The bill makes it a crime to possess radioactive or nuclear material with the intent to use it for harmful purposes […]

In a move recognized as a necessary preliminary step to multi-lateral talks on nuclear reductions, the five countries that possessed nuclear weapons when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed said Friday that China would lead a working group on coming up with common definitions of nuclear terms. The P5, made up of the United States, […]

Richard Lugar, the six-term Republican senator from Indiana and one of the GOP’s most ardent arms control advocates, was defeated in Indiana’s Republican primary yesterday by State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. Lugar joined the Senate in 1976 and one of his signature achievements came with the creation of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which helped […]

Russia’s presidential swap, which brought Vladimir Putin back to power last month, isn’t expected to bring about big changes to the arms control relationship between Moscow and Washington, according to the State Department’s top arms control official. Speaking at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting yesterday, acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and […]

Despite technical advancements in recent years, two former nuclear weapons laboratory directors still aren’t convinced that the United States should foreswear its right to nuclear testing. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director John Foster and former Sandia National Laboratories Director Paul Robinson provided a counter to a recent National […]

The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee will formally weigh in on the Obama Administration’s FY2013 request for the National Nuclear Security Administration today, matching the Administration’s $7.58 billion request for the agency’s weapons program but cutting $176 million from the request for nonproliferation work, according to a draft of the bill released yesterday. The […]

The Senate Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee has cancelled a hearing that had been scheduled for this afternoon, which was to include testimony from National Nuclear Security Administration nonproliferation chief Anne Harrington and several Pentagon officials. The subcommittee did not provide a reason for the cancellation, but said in a release the hearing […]

Following the Nuclear Security Summit held in late March in Seoul, South Korea, White House Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism and Threat Reduction Laura Holgate was rankled by the calls from some nonproliferation experts for more binding, enforceable international standards on nuclear security. “They certainly never had a basis for that to […]

House appropriators have generally gone along with many of the Obama Administration’s decisions to trim spending from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget request, but lawmakers on both sides of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee suggested yesterday that the Administration had gone too far in slowing down the agency’s Second […]

A group of nuclear nonproliferation experts are calling on Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) to hold a hearing about the Obama Administration’s decision to not require countries involved in future civilian nuclear cooperation deals to foreswear their rights to develop enrichment and reprocessing technologies. The Administration touted the 2009 nuclear cooperation deal […]

Jon Wolfsthal, the top advisor to Vice President Joe Biden on arms control, nonproliferation and nuclear security, is leaving the Administration to take a senior position at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Wolfsthal will take over as the deputy director of the nonproliferation think tank April 1. He served as a director on […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration appears to be leaning more toward opening up its Global Threat Reduction Initiative small business Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract to large businesses. The agency released another sources sought notice yesterday seeking companies to remove and transport nuclear fuel and other material from foreign research reactors around the world, asking small […]