ACA Events

Four years ago, President Barack Obama outlined an action plan to reduce nuclear weapons-related risks. Significant progress has been achieved but momentum has slowed, proliferation problems in North Korea and Iran persist, and the slow-moving arms race in South Asia continues.

Four years ago, President Obama delivered a speech outlining a series of concrete steps to move closer to a world without nuclear weapons. Since that April 5, 2009 address in Prague, the Obama administration has embarked on a number of steps to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons, secure vulnerable nuclear material, prepare for reconsideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, strengthen the barriers against further nuclear weapons proliferation, and more.

I’m very happy to help launch the latest publication of the Atlantic Council’s Iran Task Force.  I want to thank the Council for this report, as well as the “issue briefs” and panel discussions, which preceded it.

With the sequester now a reality, the Defense budget must come down. One place to look for savings is the $31 billion the United States spends each year on nuclear weapons. The Pentagon had been seeking to build a new generation of multi-billion-dollar nuclear delivery systems, including long-range missiles, submarines and bombers, as well as extending the service lives of nuclear warheads. Now, those plans are in doubt.

After an eight-month hiatus, the resumption of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group on February 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan offers a critical opportunity to move toward a diplomatic solution to the long-running standoff over Tehran's sensitive nuclear activities.

The coming year will present critical opportunities to resolve the decade-long Iranian nuclear standoff. With sanctions escalating, Iranian nuclear capabilities increasing, a soft war simmering and the threat of a full blown military conflict on the horizon, it has never been more vital that the United States and Iran find a diplomatic off ramp to prevent disaster.

Fifty years since the crisis of October 1962 brought the world to brink of nuclear war, the threats posed by the bomb have changed, but still hang over us all. There still are nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons and there are nine nuclear-armed states. More countries have access to the technologies needed to produce nuclear bomb material; the risk of nuclear terrorism is real. The United States and Russia still deploy more nuclear weapons than necessary to deter nuclear attack.

Fifty years after the October 15-28, 1962 Cuban missile crisis pushed the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe, the nuclear danger has been reduced, but the threats posed by the bomb are still with us.

Remarks as delivered by Greg Thielmann, Senior Fellow, Arms Control Association at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 20, 2012.

Prepared Remarks by Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director, Arms Control Association at Moscow Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference in Moscow, Russia on September 6, 2012.