Trump Orders Staff to Prepare Arms-Control Push with Russia and China
Paul Sonne and John Hudson | Washington Post
President Trump has ordered his administration to prepare a push for new arms-control agreements with Russia and China after bristling at the cost of a 21st-century nuclear arms race, according to administration officials. The aim of the nascent effort, a senior administration official said, is to bring Russian nuclear weapons unregulated by treaties under new limits and persuade China to join an arms-control pact limiting or verifying its capabilities for the first time. The initiative is still in its earliest stages, with officials preparing options for how to implement Trump’s order. It is unclear whether it will yield results in an administration that has locked horns with Moscow and Beijing and has less than two years left in its first term.
Former Sen. Richard Lugar, Advocate for Arms Control, Dies at 87
Louise Radnofsky and Kate O’Keefe | Wall Street Journal
Richard Lugar, a leading Republican voice on arms control in his 36 years as a senator representing Indiana, died Sunday in a Virginia hospital. He was 87. The cause of death was complications from a neurological disorder, according to the Lugar Center, the think tank he headed championing bipartisanship on issues such as weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Lugar was elected to represent Indiana in 1976, after managing a family farm and food-machinery business and serving as the mayor of Indianapolis. He rose to become the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he was defeated in a 2012 GOP primary by a tea-party-backed insurgent who branded him as insufficiently conservative.
The Iran Nuclear Archive: Impressions and Implications
Aaron Arnold et al | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
In mid-January, a team of scholars from the Belfer Center’s Intelligence and Managing the Atom Projects traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel to examine samples of, and receive briefings on, an archive of documents related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The large cache includes some 55,000 pages of documents and a further 55,000 files on CDs that included photos and videos. A clandestine Israeli intelligence operation spirited the materials out of Iran in early 2018. The documents that the Belfer group were shown confirm that senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003.
Newbuild: U.S.-Kepco Clash Over IP Rights in Saudi Bidding
Nuclear Intelligence Weekly
Ever since US-based Combustion Engineering agreed in the 1980s to almost but not entirely transfer its reactor technology to them, South Korea's nuclear developers have worked toward offering a 100% Korean-designed reactor for export. This didn't happen in Seoul's first nuclear export deal with the United Arab Emirates, but as it tries to win a second deal with Saudi Arabia, a consortium led by Korea Electric Power Co. (Kepco) is taking a shot over the bow: it is planning to offer a modified version of the APR1400 it says is sufficiently free of US content that it needs no authorizations from the US government. This has raised hackles in Washington, where Energy Secretary Rick Perry has argued that the so-called APR1400+ still contains US intellectual property (IP) and has demanded that the Korean developers abandon their plan.
KSA and Part 810: Inform Congress
Mark Hibbs | Arms Control Wonk
On April 18, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a brief on how the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) allows U.S. nuclear vendor firms to provide assistance and transfer technology to their foreign partners under 10 C.F.R. Part 810 regulations, and also about the basis in U.S. law for Congressional access to information about authorizations that DOE has granted. The report was written and published in response to Congressional interest after the Congress and the Trump Administration sparred for several months over requests by lawmakers that DOE provide them information about the contents of seven Part 810 authorizations. DOE awarded these to U.S. industry firms related to efforts by President Donald Trump and DOE Secretary Rick Perry to negotiate a bilateral agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
Signs of Life in Nuclear Diplomacy: A Look Beyond the Doom and Gloom
Kayla Matteucci | Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
In the past few years, several troubling developments—from a renewed arms race between the United States and Russia to North Korea’s development of a missile capable of striking the U.S. homeland—have fueled an apocalyptic tone among nuclear policy practitioners. As a first-time observer of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2018, I quickly became aware that a deep cynicism had permeated most every corner of the international discourse. It came as a surprise, then, that a number of states seemed to coalesce around an initiative launched by the United States in 2014: the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV). Notwithstanding pronouncements in Washington about the death of nuclear arms control, this fledgling initiative is evidence of newly fertile ground.