The U.S. believes Russia violated the New START nuclear-arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow by blocking inspections in August, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing a State Department report to Congress delivered Jan. 24.
“Two years ago, the Biden Administration naively agreed to an unconditional five-year extension of the New START Treaty with Russia, despite the Kremlin’s years of repeated violations of every other arms control agreement,” Republican leaders on the House and Senate Armed Services Committee wrote Monday in a statement. “We urge President Biden to direct the Department of Defense to prepare for a future where Russia may deploy large numbers of warheads, well in excess of New START Treaty limits.”
The Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with the NNSA’s nuclear-weapon design laboratories, awarded AMD a contract intended to improve the computer simulations that help maintain nuclear weapons.
The contract, funded through the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing profram, is “pursuing memory bandwidth and latency improvements,” James Laros, Sandia project lead and distinguished member of technical staff, said in a press release. “If successful, this effort will positively affect both aspects of future memory systems for our advanced and commodity technology platforms.”
National Nuclear Security Administration field offices graded criticality safety programs at the agency’s main nuclear weapon sites and key facilities and wrote a report about it for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Sites got graded on a scale ranging to “excellent” from “unacceptable.” No site got a lower grade than “good,” the highest possible grade, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was rated “excellent.”
The Nevada National Security Site recently wrote up a summary of its contribution to the nuclear-fusion-in-the-lab milestone in December at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility.
The site’s Livermore Operations (LO) helps the lab with diagnostic characterizations, development, and deployment, according to the write-up.
The U.S. and Japanese governments virtually held the 14th meeting of the U.S.-Japan Emergency Management Working Group. Co-chairing the meeting were Shinichi Araki, director general of the Nuclear Disaster Management Bureau of the Cabinet Office of Japan, and Jay Tilden, associate administrator for counterterrorism and counterproliferation for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“ The participants identified opportunities for collaboration, including mutual observation of drills and exercises, sharing lessons learned and best practices for virtual/hybrid events, and technical exchanges on subject matters such as unmanned and automated methods, balancing radiological and non-radiological health impacts of emergencies, and effective communication with the public,” according to an NNSA press release.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said it signed a $25-million cooperative agreement with a university coalition for nuclear forensics research.
The deal provides $5 million a year over five years to the consortium, led by the University of Florida, to “address the gaps and challenges within important research fields in nuclear forensics through five research thrust areas: rapid turnaround forensics, advanced analytical methods, ultrasensitive measurements, signature discovery, and prompt effects and measurements,” the NNSA wrote in a press release.
