Mary Ilyushina and Missy Ryan | The Washington Post
Russia is prepared to take military measures to “counter-deter” NATO’s expanding arsenal in Europe in response to a U.S. decision to deploy longer-range missiles in Germany for the first time since the 1980s, high-ranking Moscow officials said Thursday. “Beyond any doubt, our military has already taken note of this statement,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told journalists on the sidelines of a parliamentary forum in St. Petersburg. “I think that it is just a component of the escalation policy, one of the elements of intimidation, which today is almost the main part of the Russia policy pursued by NATO and the U.S.”
HYUNG-JIN KIM | Associated Press
North Korea threatened Saturday to boost its nuclear fighting capability and make the United States and South Korea pay “an unimaginably harsh price” as it slammed its rivals’ new defense guidelines that it says reveal an intention to invade the North. On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol authorized the signing of joint nuclear deterrence guidelines as part of efforts to enhance their capabilities to cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal. The guidelines were adopted a year after the two countries established a consultation body to bolster information-sharing on nuclear operations and discuss how to integrate U.S. nuclear weapons and South Korean conventional weapons in contingencies.
Jeongmin Kim | NK News
South Korea could introduce its own nuclear submarine in the future if Seoul and Washington deem it necessary to counter North Korean threats, according to the commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, while stressing that it’s not necessary now. Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, made the remarks to ROK reporters after President Yoon Suk-yeol visited the command’s headquarters in Hawaii last week, the presidential office belatedly confirmed on Monday…But Yang Uk, a military analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, called it misleading to characterize Paparo’s statement as giving the green light for acquisition.“For the U.S., a nuclear-powered submarine is fundamentally meaningful if it is possessed by a country that will go out into the ocean together to contain China. In terms of nuclear weapons and related matters, the U.S. has always been highly vigilant toward South Korea due to this viewpoint,” Yang told NK News.
THERESA HITCHENS | Breaking Defense
While the Air Force struggles to construct a plan to cut back the Sentinel program’s skyrocketing costs, work has not stopped in the development of the new ICBM to replace the service’s aging arsenal of Minuteman III missiles, according to the service’s nuclear policy guru. “[W]ork can still continue under the contract that exists today. So, we don’t want to slow down, come to a full stop on the program, but there does need to be a restructure to get after the cost growth has happened,” Lt. Gen Andrew Gebara, deputy chief of staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, told the Mitchell Institute today.
Firat Kozok and Patrick Sykes | Blookmberg
Russia’s state-owned Rosatom Corp. is “ahead” in a bid to build Turkey’s second nuclear power plant, in the latest sign of Ankara’s growing energy ties with Moscow…South Korea is the other country that’s known to have held talks on the planned four-reactor facility on the Black Sea coast. The Sinop plant could involve a joint venture between the public and private sectors, and licensing is expected to take two or three years, Bayraktar said.
Kelsey Davenport | Arms Control Association
Preventing a nuclear-armed Iran remains a top U.S. security objective, but in recent months Tehran has accelerated its sensitive nuclear activities and threatened to pursue nuclear weapons, creating significant new challenges for addressing proliferation risks. Since Iran began breaching limits imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), it has expanded its uranium enrichment capacity, amassed more nuclear material, and invested in new, more proliferation-sensitive activities. Whereas Iran’s initial violations of the JCPOA’s limits were designed to pressure the United States to return to the accord after former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, Tehran’s more recent nuclear activities appear focused on reaching the threshold of nuclear weapons. These advances irreversibly altered the pathways available to Iran if the decision were made to develop nuclear weapons and the speed at which Tehran could produce weapons-grade material. In addition to Iran’s technical advances, the proliferation risk posed by Iran’s threshold status is compounded by its decisions to reduce International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring and a security environment that risks tilting Tehran’s calculus toward developing a nuclear arsenal.