With an eye toward exposing national security blindspots in nations considering nuclear power, the National Nuclear Security Administration is talking to people in Turkey, Africa and southeast Asia, an agency official told a National Academies panel this week.
“There are some countries in Africa, Turkey is one of the countries that’s currently looking at developing a nuclear program that we’re working with, and there’s some other countries in southeast Asia, I believe, that are kind of on our focus right now,” Art Atkins, assistant deputy administrator for global material security at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said Tuesday in a video presentation to the Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
NNSA wants to be “part of the broader conversation as it relates to security investments, security preparation, training … and integration of security in planning when it comes to development of those kind of long-term investment plans that countries have to go through” to add nuclear power to their energy mix, Atkins said.
Atkins spoke about NNSA’s work with nuclear-energy-aspirant nations in response to a question from Nuclear and Radiation Studies board member Elanor Melamed, who held Atkins’ post at NNSA until retiring in June 2020 and worked at the agency for years before that.
“I think this work is really important and especially in light of the extensive outreach that Russia has done in this area,” Melamed said. “It needs a counterbalance and we really need to do a lot more counterbalancing.”
Atkins was the second of two panelists and spoke to the board only minutes after Vadim Chumak, the laboratory head at Ukraine’s National Research Center for Radiation Medicine, gave one of his dispatches by video from Ukraine, now nearly two months into a war of Russian aggression there.
In ordering the invasion of Ukraine in late February, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and dictator, cited — amid a flurry of unsubstantiated claims including Ukrainian ambitions to build nuclear weapons and Khiv’s alleged mistreatment of Russia sympathizers in the Crimean peninsula that Moscow seized by force in 2014 — Ukraine’s proximity to NATO and the consequent national security threat Russia perceived.
The war has soured almost all that was left of U.S.-Russia relations, including putting the NNSA’s nonproliferation work with Belarus on hold after that country abetted the invasion by allowing Russia to stage troops there, along Ukraine’s northern border.
“Our work with Belarus has now been discontinued and it’s making us rethink our strategy in the region,” Atkins said.
