A senior National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official said Monday that fostering nuclear security relationships between U.S. and Russian technical experts, as was done in the 1990s, would play a significant role in restoring otherwise chilly relations between the two countries.
“There is a quality to science-to-science relationships that transcends a lot of the political and other disruptions that we are now experiencing,” Anne Harrington, the NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said at a Capitol Hill event marking the 25th anniversary of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
The program was initiated at the Pentagon in the early 1990s to secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction materials and infrastructure spread across former Soviet states. The program has been hailed as one of the most successful initiatives in nonproliferation, having deactivated over 7,600 strategic nuclear warheads, among other accomplishments.
Throughout the 1990s, U.S. nuclear scientists and technical experts partnered with their Russian counterparts on enhancements in nuclear materials protection, control, and accounting at nuclear facilities in Russia. The Brookhaven, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia national laboratories each played different roles at Russian institutes in these laboratory-to-laboratory programs.
“I am a firm believer that reviving and allowing some of that relationship to rekindle can be a pathway back to some sort of larger relationship,” Harrington said. She highlighted the repatriation of high-risk fissile material and the nuclear agreement with Iran as two areas in which the U.S. and Russia have successfully worked together. On the first, she said, “this has been a marvelous partnership . . . and there’s no indication from either side that we wish to discontinue that work.”
