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Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon was in Washington last week to save the troubled U.S.-India nuclear deal. U.S. negotiators should ensure that the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement meets the letter and spirit of that law. Anything Less should be rejected by Congress.
President Vladimir Putin has sharply criticized the United States and NATO and suspended Russian participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Russians are clearly frustrated with what they perceive to be a lack of respect for their concerns, but Putin's omissions are important clues to Russian tactics in this scrap with the United States.
George Perkovich says there is no question that Iran has not complied yet with the IAEA investigation into its nuclear activities despite its claims to the contrary. He predicts that if pressure from the UN Security Council and others persists, in time a “core” group in Iran may agree to suspend uranium enrichment, opening the door to possible agreements across the board on a number of issues.
Iran is becoming more isolated because of its refusal to take steps to build international confidence that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
On March 20, 2007, Dr. Dunn presented the findings of the SAIC report, Foreign Perspectives on U.S Nuclear Policy and Posture: Insights, Issues and Implications. report was sponsored by the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office (ASCO) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The report covers foreign perceptions of U.S. nuclear posture and policy since the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).
(The following op-ed by Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, first appeared in Defense News on March 5, 2007.)
Following the end of U.S. nuclear testing a decade and a half ago, some scientists and policy-makers worried that the reliability of U.S. nuclear warheads could diminish as their plutonium cores age. They claimed it would take a decade or more to see if the nation’s weapon laboratories could maintain the existing stockpile of well-tested but aging weapons without further nuclear blasts.
Such concerns led many senators to withhold their support for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999.
Time has addressed the skeptics’ concerns. For more than a decade, a multibillion-dollar Stockpile Stewardship program has successfully maintained the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal in the absence of testing. As the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. military strategy has diminished, there has been no need to test new types of nukes.
But now, the Bush administration is asking Congress to fund an ambitious effort to build new replacement warheads, which it claims is needed to avoid plutonium aging problems that could reduce weapon reliability. (Read More)
Russia's decision to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty - an important and successful component of the arms control regime - threatens nonproliferation goals. Rather than unilaterally withdrawing, Russia should request exceptions to accomodate its concerns.
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