Nuclear nonproliferation is the most promising area for cooperation between Russia and the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week.
Opportunities for cooperation include, “above all, control over non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Putin said during the annual Direct Line event broadcast on June 15. “We are the biggest nuclear powers and so our cooperation in this area is absolutely natural.”
Putin’s remarks come during a trying time for the two countries’ bilateral relations, marked in recent days by competing interests in the Syrian civil war, a new round of U.S. sanctions, and ongoing controversies over Russia’s influence in last year’s U.S. presidential election.
“We do not consider America our enemy,” Putin said during the program, however, noting that the two sides were allied in the two World Wars. “Russophobia” in the U.S., he said, “is primarily a result of the escalating political infighting.” He added that both the United States and Russia “are extremely interested” in restoring their relationship.
The two nations’ nuclear security relationship has thinned in recent years, as Russian officials decided to conduct work on the physical security of nuclear material largely independently. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program that once worked to secure nuclear and other WMD materials throughout former Soviet territories has been phased out, and more recently Russia withdrew from a bilateral agreement intended to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium on each side.
Current joint efforts largely center on nuclear fuel repatriations from third countries. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s former deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation said late last year that boosting relationships between U.S. and Russian technical experts could play a major role in restoring the bilateral relationship, specifically through joint nuclear security work.
