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. It 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 in recent years. 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.”
Scientists working through the lab-to-lab partnerships reported significant progress throughout the 1990s. For example, at the Kurchatov Institute, a Russian nuclear physics research facility in Moscow with nearly 10,000 employees, program teams in 1996 reported enhancements to physical protection systems such as entry control systems and sensors that mostly used Russian-manufactured equipment. The intent was to secure fissile material to prevent unauthorized access and potential theft by hostile actors that could then use the material to make deadly weapons.
The institution’s collaborations with the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories involved physical protection system upgrades and development of computerized systems for the control and accounting of nuclear materials. Its work with the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore labs involved nuclear material identification technology and vulnerability assessments.
In 1996, a team of scientists also noted progress at the Bochvar All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Inorganic Materials (VNIINM), a nuclear power and spent fuel research center. The group highlighted, among other things, Brookhaven’s assistance to VNIINM on the development of material control and accounting requirements for bulk fissile material measurements, and Los Alamos’ assistance on the development of computerized accounting systems and physical protection enhancements.
The architects of the program, former Sens. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), have spoken about the need to re-engage Russia on nuclear security and nonproliferation, areas of common interest for the two countries. However, Nunn said Monday at the CTR event, the two governments are not having the kind of military-to-military discussions they previously were during the implementation of the program. Nunn called for resuming those discussions, arguing, “how can you not do it . . . when you’ve got a chance of escalation and when nuclear rhetoric is being thrown around? It’s extremely dangerous where we are today.”
