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Earlier this week the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, an extension of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, reported on efforts to protect America from terrorists that seek nuclear weapons and materials. Their verdict was not a happy one. Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton cited “insufficient progress” in the race against time to prevent the world’s most dangerous people from getting the world’s most dangerous weapons. In short, they wrote, “the size of the problem still dwarfs the policy response.”
Kean and Hamilton reported that less than half of Russia’s nuclear material has received security upgrades. In real terms, this means that more than 300 tons of loose nuclear material remains unguarded in Russia and the former Soviet states. That is enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium for tens of thousands of crude nuclear bombs. In the past year, moreover, security improvements were completed twice as slowly as expected. The Department of Energy’s nuclear security administration now estimates that this work will not be complete until 2020. Securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union is an essential front in the war on terror. We must progress at a faster rate. (Read More)
United States and India today are happily confronted by an unprecedented convergence of interests, values, and inter-societal ties in a way never experienced before in the close to sixty-year history of the bilateral relationship. Given India’s importance to the United States, the president should continue working with New Delhi toward a full partnership.
At Carnegie's 2005 International Nonproliferation Conference, Pierre Goldschmidt discusses a mechanism that he says could form the basis of a guaranteed fuel supply concept to deal particularly with cases in which a state is found in non-compliance with its IAEA safeguards agreement while ensuring against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Building the bomb was a feat of engineering and physics; controlling it would take politics and cooperation. This was clear to Harry S Truman when he tabled the first international nonproliferation proposal 60 years ago this November.
On November 15, 1945, President Truman joined with Prime Minister Clement Attlee of the United Kingdom and Prime Minister William Mackenzie King of Canada in a proposal for the future of atomic energy. The two-page statement called for careful planning by a new international atomic energy commission to be established by the United Nations. The statement itself also explicitly foreshadows the tension between energy needs and security imperatives that continues unresolved decades later. (Read More)
On Tuesday, October 25, the Chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Pete Domenici (R-NM) announced that Senate Energy appropriators would recede to the House position and eliminate funds for the controversial Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) from the fiscal year 2006 budget.
As a result, for the second year in a row, a bipartisan coalition of forces has denied funding for the RNEP, which should effectively end the research on nuclear earth penetrators.
The catalyst for the RNEP program was the Pentagon's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for the United States to develop "new nuclear weapon capabilities" to deal with targets located in deep underground, hardened bunkers. The next year, the Bush administration requested funds for research for a modified, high-yield bomb for this mission. (Read More)
More than a year after the Bush administration’s self-imposed deadline for deploying an antimissile system, the program appears in limbo, with no signs that the system will be declared operational. There are even signs the administration is giving up on the system.
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski took his scalpel to the administration’s national security strategy in an opinion piece Oct. 13. Former State Department chief of staff Larry Wilkerson assisted in the surgery with an October 19 speech. The war in Iraq has hurt “America's ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation,” Brzezinski says.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s first visit to China since taking office is designed to promote dialogue with China’s military. Some recent administration reports and statements argue that China is building up its nuclear forces and is a growing threat to international security. Rumsfeld’s visit comes ahead of President George W. Bush’s scheduled visit to China in November. For current data and analysis of China’s strategic forces, we have provided an excerpt from the China chapter in Carnegie’s recent publication, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear Biological, and Chemical Threats. (Read More)