Digests and Blog

August 29, 2011 is the second official International Day Against Nuclear Tests. It coincides with the 20th anniversary of the historic events that led to the closure of the former Soviet nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk, where more than 456 explosions contaminated the land and its inhabitants.The courageous efforts of the Kazakh people and their allies forced Moscow’s communist regime to halt nuclear weapons testing and catalyzed actions elsewhere around the globe that eventually led to a U.S. nuclear testing halt and the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.The damage caused by…

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) By Greg Thielmann Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) has taken his tried and (un)true mantra about the Iranian ICBM threat on the road, according to recent reporting from his home state. In language nearly identical to his statement at a Senate hearing in Washington last year, Inhofe said: "We know – and it is not even classified for me to tell you today – that Iran will have the capability of delivering a weapon of mass destruction to western Europe and the eastern United States by 2015." As a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inhofe should know…

By Greg Thielmann Last week's 20th anniversary commemorations of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt prompted some personal reflections on other events affecting relations between Washington and Moscow during that turbulent period. Two years before the coup, a visit by U.S. warships to the Soviet Black Sea Fleet's home port of Sevastopol made a significant contribution to thawing Cold War animosities. At that time, the Associated Press reported a "riotous welcome" from the citizens of that closed Crimean city, a characterization I can attest to as a U.S. Embassy officer witnessing the event. USS…

By Daryl G. Kimball Arms control works when governments and political leaders work together and commit the necessary resources to get the job done. This week, the South African government and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the successful return 13.8 pounds of highly enriched uranium to the United States for disposal. The operation is part of the long-running Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which converts nuclear reactors to run on non-weapon-grade low enriched uranium (LEU) rather than highly enriched uranium (HEU). The South African operation returned U.S.-…

By Daryl G. Kimball Former Senator Mark O. Hatfield, R-Oregon (Image Source: AP) This past weekend, former Republican Senator from Oregon, Mark O. Hatfield, passed away at the age of 89. Hatfield was the real deal: working across the aisle, he was a pragmatic idealist who took on big issues, including the insanity of the nuclear arms race. He was a big part of the long-running effort to end the nuclear weapons threat. The work of organizations such as the Arms Control Association is built upon the foundations for global peace and security built by leaders such as Hatfield. Here are a couple…

By Tom Z. Collina The following entry was originally posted on The Hill's Congress Blog on August 2, 2011. As the dust settles on the just-passed budget deal, one thing is becoming clear: there is now high-level bipartisan agreement that the U.S. defense budget will be reduced in a major way, anywhere from $350 to $850 billion over the next decade, according to the White House. And despite defense hawk grumblings, reductions of this magnitude can actually make America safer by forcing leaders to cancel low-priority programs and focus on the ones that really matter. It's time to get serious…

By Daryl G. Kimball Over the weekend, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993-97, John M. Shalikashvili passed away. As the obituaries in The Washington Post and The New York Times note, he had an amazing personal story and illustrious career. President Barack Obama said, in part, "... the United States has lost a genuine soldier-statesman whose extraordinary life represented the promise of America and the limitless possibilities that are open to those who choose to serve it. From his arrival in the United States as a 16-year old Polish immigrant after the Second World War, to a…

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. on Capitol Hill Monday, July 18, 2011 (Image Source: Associated Press) By Greg Thielmann Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) proposed a plan this week for reducing the deficit that includes $79 billion in cuts from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years. In specifying the individual components of a reduced strategic force structure, Coburn deserves credit for helping to break the strait jacket of Cold War thinking, which still burdens considerations of 21st century defense needs. As Ben Loehrke of the Ploughshares Fund noted in his July 19 analysis,…

The U.S. Atomic Energy Detection System (USAEDS), a sensor system established in 1947, is capable of detecting “nuclear explosions that occur under land or sea, in the atmosphere or in space,” according to a July 12, 2011 Department of Defense news report. This detection system monitors three important nuclear treaties, the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Threshold Ban Treaty (1974), and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty (1976), and is based out of the U.S. Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC). The news report states that USAEDS is comprised of sensors aboard over 20…

(Image Source: The United Nations Office at Geneva) By Rob Golan-Vilella Two weeks ago, some eyebrows were raised when North Korea assumed the rotating presidency of the Conference on Disarmament (CD). Observers mocked the idea that North Korea—an international pariah state that in the past decade has withdrawn from the NPT and conducted two nuclear tests—could become the president of an organization whose mission is to negotiate agreements relating to nuclear disarmament. This week, Canada responded to this news by announcing that it will boycott the current session of the CD until Pyongyang…