Future efforts to secure Russian nuclear material left after from the Cold War are likely to bear little resemblance to the gold-standard programs of the past, if any get off the ground in the current era of significantly worsened relations between Washington and Moscow, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a recent report.
“[T]he scope of future cooperation would likely be a limited partnership, would primarily involve training and information sharing rather than directly supporting security upgrades at Russian sites,” according to last week’s report, titled “Nuclear Nonproliferation, Past U.S. Involvement Improved Russian Nuclear Material Security, but Little Is Known about Current Conditions.”
From the early 1990s through the mid-2010s, the United States helped secure weapons-usable Russian nuclear material, in great part through what came to be known as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Material Protection, Control, and Accounting program.
Those efforts chugged along for decades until after 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Washington and Moscow then curtailed nearly all of their official cooperation and correspondence over Russian nuclear-material security.
The Kremlin continued to fund some material-security programs after Crimea, but “it is unlikely that Russian funding is sufficient to account for the loss of U.S. financial support,” the GAO said.
Meanwhile, Congress, in annual defense authorization bills, for example, has made it broadly illegal for the U.S. and Russia to cooperate on nuclear nonproliferation programs. Political relations between the two countries have only worsened as, among other things, Russian wages disinformation campaigns that meddle with U.S. elections and electoral politics. Moscow’s alleged disregard for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty contributed to the U.S. decision to leave that agreement last year.
The NNSA had no comments about GAO’s 33-page nonproliferation report. The Senate ordered the congressional auditor to look into the state of bilateral nonproliferation efforts between the U.S. and Russia in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law in August 2018.
