The National Nuclear Security Administration will host diplomats at Sandia National Laboratories and Nevada National Security Sites in July with aims to be transparent about its activities and its moratorium on nuclear testing.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) labs will host diplomats from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty Organization, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore, Mexico, Japan, Ghana, and Australia, according to a post by NNSA on the website X.
“[The diplomats] will learn about U.S. support for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty [CTBT] and the moratorium on nuclear explosive testing,” NNSA said in its post.
The U.S. put a self-imposed moratorium on testing nuclear weapons at full yield 1992. Since then, NNSA and predecessor agencies have used subcritical experiments that NNSA says do not produce the self-sustaining nuclear chain-reaction that a nuclear weapon would. NNSA has performed 33 subcritical experiments in Nevada.
In a recent op-ed published in Foreign Affairs, former president Donald Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’brien said the U.S. should return to nuclear weapons testing and ignore the CTBT that NNSA adheres to.
