NATO members convening in Chicago yesterday endorsed the alliance’s Deterrence and Defense Posture Review, and as expected, the documented contained few surprises. The review recommits NATO to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons, as the alliance stated at its Lisbon Summit in 2010, but said it will remain a nuclear alliance for as long as nuclear weapons exist. It also said that it is “prepared to consider” reducing its arsenal of approximately 200 U.S. tactical nuclear weapons if Russia were to make reductions of its own, and it said that the NATO Advisory Committee will task appropriate committees to “further consider, in the context of the broader security environment, what NATO would expect to see in the way of reciprocal Russian actions to allow for significant reductions in forward-based non-strategic nuclear weapons assigned to NATO.” The document also commits NATO to ensuring that its NATO stockpile is “safe, secure, and effective.” The report is available here.
NATO DETERRENCE REVIEW RELEASED WITH FEW SURPRISES
Westinghouse, Bechtel, Polish partner move forward on nuclear plant contract talks
The consortium of Bechtel and Westinghouse and Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ) have agreed on major commercial terms of the engineering procurement and construction contract to use Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor technology at Poland’s first nuclear plant. PEJ handed over the leading role of the project to Bechtel in August. The companies’ have now set the foundation […]