June 2026
By Xiaodon Liang

Budget documents indicate the U.S. Air Force plans to assess options for a new heavy bomber that could replace the B-52H.

The service is requesting $1 million from Congress to begin a heavy bomber analysis of alternatives in fiscal year 2027, according to Air Force research and development funding documents.

The study would “determine future B-52 requirements and costs and/or a new heavy bomber aircraft configuration and costs.” The analysis of alternatives was first reported May 6 by Aviation Week.

In fiscal 2027, the study would begin by conducting “initial planning activities to develop key performance parameters, key system attributes, and additional performance attributes for a follow-on heavy bomber.”

The Air Force is already procuring a new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider. In 2021, Bloomberg News reported that the originally planned fleet of 100 B-21s would cost $89 billion in constant 2019 dollars to acquire. The Pentagon is separately weighing whether to buy more B-21s. (See ACT, May 2026.)

The B-52H first entered service in 1961. The Air Force is currently executing several sustainment and capability improvement programs to extend the lifespan of the venerable fleet.

Notably, these programs include a $3 billion radar modernization and a $19 billion engine replacement. The Air Force announced May 4 that the new engine had recently passed a critical design review and that the first bombers would be upgraded this year.

The fiscal 2027 budget documents also indicate that the Air Force is requesting $30 million from Congress this year to begin development of a new weapon pylon for the B-52H that would be capable of carrying heavier and a larger number of missiles or bombs.

The request specifically mentions the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, a tactical cruise missile, as an example.

Seventy-six B-52Hs remain operational, according to the Air Force. Approximately 42 of these bombers are certified for nuclear roles, according to the Federation of American Scientists, and roughly three-quarters of those planes were typically reported by the United States as deployed strategic bombers under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

In the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress permitted the secretary of defense to recertify all B-52Hs in the fleet for nuclear missions.

June 2026
By Xiaodon Liang

In a series of public hearings, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) defended its plans for plutonium pit production at two sites at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Savannah River, South Carolina, as Congress raised questions at budget hearings about cost overruns and delays to the pit program.

The hearings were held on five dates in May 2026 at cities near the two proposed production plants, as well as at sites near Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Kansas City weapons components plant in Missouri, and in Washington, D.C.

In each case, NNSA officials presented an overview of a programmatic environmental impact statement released April 10 for the two-site production plan. The agency was ordered to produce the environmental study and to hold public hearings after a judge ruled in September 2024 that the NNSA had breached the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately study the environmental consequences. (See ACT, November 2024.)

The draft impact statement describes the NNSA’s assessment of three alternatives: a no-action option that would produce 30 pits per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory while continuing construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, a single-site option that would focus production of 80 pits per year at one or the other site, and a multi-site option that corresponds with the agency’s preferred plan to produce 30 pits annually at Los Alamos and 50 pits annually at Savannah River.

In the study, the NNSA argues that its options are constrained by demands of the U.S. Congress, including an instruction in last year’s national defense authorization act that the agency pursue pit production at both sites. (See ACT, January/February 2026.)

The draft statement is “a retroactive rubber stamp,” said Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, at the May 14 hearing in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Tom Clements of Savannah River Site Watch, a plaintiff in the lawsuit that forced the new hearings, said at the May 5 hearing in North Augusta, S. C., that the draft statement still lacks a realistic plan for management of transuranic and low-level waste.

Not all comments at the hearings were critical of the NNSA’s study. Some local interest groups and chambers of commerce spoke in favor of the economic benefits pit production would bring to Los Alamos and Savannah River.

The hearings come at a critical time for the Savannah River facility, which is under increasing scrutiny as the NNSA reports a “budgetary placeholder” estimate of $25 billion as the cost of the construction project in the agency’s fiscal year 2027 budget request.

“I want to ask the hard questions. Do we need two plutonium pit production facilities?” asked Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), chair of the energy and water development subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, at an April 29 hearing. “I’m not saying we don’t, but we’re going to have to talk about it,” Kennedy said, in a rare admission of Republican doubts.

On Feb. 27, the NNSA re-tendered the managing and operating contract for the Savannah River Site, after a Dec. 9 performance evaluation found that the current contracting consortium “underperformed” in executing work on the new plutonium facility.

“The timeline and the budget is not acceptable,” said Brandon Williams, the NNSA administrator, at a May 13 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We are reevaluating the requirements from a bottom-up, top-down approach,” he said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime supporter of projects at the Savannah River Site, quizzed Secretary of Energy Chris Wright April 22 over the reprogramming of $149 million of appropriated funds from Savannah River to Los Alamos. “I don’t feel good about it,” Graham said at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee. “That wasn’t the intent” of Congress.

David Beck, the NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee April 20 that projections for pit production at Los Alamos in 2026 have risen after he “brainstormed ideas with experts across the complex” and made changes to the “regulatory environment” at the facility.

June 2026
By Libby Flatoff

The United Kingdom has halted a deal to cede the disputed Chagos Islands archipelago to Mauritius after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew his support.

The largest island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, contains a shared U.S.-UK military base. Under the deal, signed May 22, 2025, the UK would have paid Mauritius an average of $136 million per year to lease back this island for the UK and the United States to operate the naval and bomber base for at least 99 years. (See ACT, Jan/Feb 2025.)

The deal required U.S. support because the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed between Westminster and Washington in 1996, needed to be amended to allow the transfer of the islands. Many U.S. Republicans were against the treaty change and the deal due to Mauritius’s proximity and friendliness toward China.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) stated in a March 13 press release, “When two countries shake hands on a treaty, one of them can’t start changing the terms without the other country agreeing to it. That’s just common sense. That’s why I take issue with the United Kingdom trying to give our joint military base on Diego Garcia to a pal of [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s—all without getting the U.S. Senate’s consent.”

He said he introduced a bill that “would make sure that our friends in the U.K. don’t modify our treaty and hand this gift to China without giving the Senate a say.”

Although Trump and his administration initially favored the deal, he wrote in a Jan. 20 social media post that the UK decision to give away Diego Garcia was “an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another [reason] in very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”

At the time, he was pushing hard to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory within Denmark that has refused Trump’s demands.

Trump even went so far as to call on Denmark and other European Allies to “DO THE RIGHT THING,” and stop the UK from following through on the Chagos deal.

By Feb. 5, he seemed to walk back the criticism and once again showed reluctant support for the deal in a social media post, writing that “I understand that the deal [UK] Prime Minister [Keir] Starmer has made, according to many, the best he could make.”

But later that month Trump changed his reason for disliking the deal, and in a Feb. 18 social media post, wrote, “that Leases are no good when it comes to Countries, and that [Starmer] is making a big mistake by entering a 100 Year Lease.… they have to remain strong in the face of Wokeism, and other problems put before them. DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!”

Ten days before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, Trump made another social media post Feb. 18, stating that “it may be necessary for the United States to use Diego Garcia, and the Airfield located in Fairford [England], in order to eradicate a potential attack by a highly unstable and dangerous Regime.”

The Guardian reported that without U.S. support, the UK Parliament was forced to shelve the bill as time ran out in the parliamentary session.

Upon hearing that the deal had been indefinitely paused, Mauritian Foreign Minister Dhananjay Ramful said, “We will spare no effort to seize any diplomatic or legal avenue to complete the decolonization process,” according to The Guardian. “This is a matter of justice.” The fate of the deal is unclear.

June 2026
By Kelsey Davenport

The United States announced it would contribute funds to repair damage done to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and urged other states to also commit resources to securing the site.

In an April 29 press release, the State Department announced that the United States would provide up to $100 million “to ensure the continued containment of fissile nuclear material at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine.”

The repairs are necessary after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that the New Safe Confinement structure, built over the reactor at the Chernobyl site after it melted down in 1986, sustained damage during a February 2025 drone strike. The IAEA concluded in a November 2025 report that the containment structure “lost its primary safety functions” due to damage caused by the strike during the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine. (See ACT, January/February 2026.) “Without repairs, the [existing structure] can no longer provide adequate protection, creating the specter of a dangerous leak of highly radioactive material in Europe,” the State Department spokesperson’s office wrote.

The Group of 7 world economic powers estimated that the total cost of the repairs will be $500 million. In the April 29 press statement, the State Department called “upon [its] G7 and European partners to follow suit and make substantial financial commitments to share the burden of these essential repairs.”

In an April 25 statement marking the 40-year anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, the European Union’s Directorate-General for Enlargement and Eastern Neighbourhood said that the “EU will continue supporting Ukraine and assisting in ensuring nuclear safety, security and radiation protection.” The statement noted that the EU’s Instrument for Nuclear Safety Cooperation provided $43 million for nuclear safety in Ukraine last year, some of which would go toward repairing the New Safe Confinement structure.

The statement used the Chernobyl anniversary to call attention to the ongoing nuclear security and safety risks in Ukraine. Russia’s illegal seizure and continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine “significantly increase the risk to human life and environmental protection,” the statement said. It added that “Moscow’s systematic attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure threaten the stable power supply required for the safe operation of nuclear facilities.”

According to a May 7 statement from IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi, a drone struck the External Radiation Control Laboratory at the Zaporizhzhia plant May 3. The IAEA team at Zaporizhzhia visited the laboratory the following day, and “observed damage to meteorological equipment used to collect real-time environmental parameters in the event of a nuclear or radiological emergency,” according to Grossi’s statement. The equipment is currently not operable, the statement said.

Grossi said that “we cannot afford for the next damage to occur on essential nuclear safety equipment” and called upon “both sides to make all efforts to avoid military activities in the vicinity of nuclear facilities—wherever they are located.”

The previous week, a worker at the Zaporizhzhia complex was killed by a drone strike, according to an April 30 statement from the IAEA. In that statement, Grossi urged all parties to abide by Pillar 3 of the “seven indispensable pillars” of nuclear security and safety during conflict.

Pillar 3 states that “the operating staff must be able to fulfil their safety and security duties and have the capacity to make decisions free of undue pressure.” Grossi announced the seven pillars in May 2022, shortly after Russia attacked Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia in the opening days of its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

June 2026

Thirty Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives are urging President Donald Trump’s administration to provide Congress with information regarding Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons program.

They made their request in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio May 4 that represents a rare congressional effort to challenge longstanding U.S. policy regarding its ally Israel’s nuclear posture.

Led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), the lawmakers said that greater transparency regarding Israel’s nuclear capabilities is necessary given the nuclear risks associated with the ongoing conflict involving the United States and Israel against Iran.

“We are in the fullest sense, fighting this war side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” they wrote. They argued that “We cannot develop coherent nonproliferation policy for the Middle East, including with respect to Iran’s civil nuclear program,” while maintaining “official silence” on Israel’s nuclear capabilities, and urged that the administration “hold Israel to the same standard of transparency” applied to other states.

“We do not believe we have received that information,” the lawmakers wrote. Signatories included the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group co-chairs, Don Beyer (D-Va.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.), as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

Israel is not a party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the bedrock of international nuclear arms control, and has long maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity, under which it neither confirms nor denies possessing nuclear weapons.

U.S. policy toward Israel’s nuclear program largely traces its origins to a tacit 1969 understanding between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Under the arrangement, Israel has maintained nuclear ambiguity while successive U.S. administrations refrained from publicly challenging Israel’s undeclared nuclear status.

Public estimates by the Federation of American Scientists and the Nuclear Threat Initiative place Israel’s arsenal at approximately 90 nuclear warheads.—SHAGHAYEGH CHRIS ROSTAMPOUR

June 2026

Turkey unveiled a new missile that, once deployed, will give the country a long-range strike capability.

Turkey displayed its new long-range, domestically developed system for the first time May 5 at the SAHA 2026 International Defence and Aerospace Exhibition in Istanbul. The new missile, dubbed the Yildirimhan, can carry a 3,000-kilogram conventional warhead more than 6,000 kilometers, according to a May 7 post by an X account that monitors the Turkish defense industry. That range puts the missile over the 5,500-kilometer threshold for classification as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The missile will be conventionally armed and road-mobile, according to the Turkish Ministry of Defense. Unlike most ICBMs, which are powered by multiple stages, the Yildirimhan’s single stage is powered by four rocket motors.

Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler said in a May 5 press conference that the missile “represents a significant technological milestone as Turkey’s first liquid-fueled rocket missile system, capable of hypersonic-speed flight and possessing the country’s longest range.”

The missile has not yet been tested.

Turkey referenced a specific threat that drove the decision to develop an ICBM capability when Guler suggested that the new missile is necessary for Turkey’s security. He also said that it helps demonstrate that Turkey “offers its allies not only weapon systems but also technology” at sustainable costs.

In January 2025, TRT Haber reported that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey “decided to … accelerate our missile development program with a range of 2,000 kilometers and above” to counter regional threats.

Turkey has developed and deployed several short-range missile systems, which are defined as having a range of less than 1,000 kilometers. Its longest-range missile tested to date, the Tayfun Block 4, has an estimated range of 1,000 kilometers and was first tested in October 2025.—KELSEY DAVENPORT

June 2026
By Daryl G. Kimball

After four weeks of tough negotiations and debate, the pivotal 11th nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference failed to reach consensus on a very modest outcome document that would have formally reaffirmed support for the treaty and the consensus decisions of the 1995, 2000, and 2010 review conferences.

The result was the third straight review conference that fell short of a consensus outcome. Although not unexpected, it was yet another very disappointing missed opportunity to reinforce the treaty’s credibility at a time of unprecedented nuclear danger.

The conference showed that rhetorical support for the NPT remains strong, but follow-through has been weak. As a result, the foundation of the NPT—the framework for global efforts to reduce and eliminate the world’s most dangerous weapons—is cracking due to inattention, intransigence, and ineptitude.

Conference President Do Hung Viet smartly pursued agreement on a draft outcome document that was relatively short but comprehensive. He invited states to show flexibility, focus on principles and practical actions, and avoid name-calling. Most states did so, several did not. In the search for consensus, he was forced to drop paragraphs on some important yet hotly contested issues. Some problems and some delegations defied such solutions.

Although no one state blocked consensus, a key reason it was not achieved was the U.S. insistence on including language saying, “Iran can never seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” and excluding language condemning the recent U.S. and Israeli attacks on safeguarded Iranian nuclear facilities.

Worse still, despite the best efforts of many non-nuclear-weapon states, the final draft document did not include specific or time-bound commitments to act on the treaty’s disarmament goals and objectives. This was mainly due to the obduracy and lack of ambition from the treaty’s five nuclear-armed states, none of whom can credibly claim they are complying with their NPT Article VI disarmament obligations.

For the first time since 1972, there are no agreed limits on the size of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, the world’s largest. There are no negotiations between any of the nuclear- armed states to limit or reduce their arsenals, and there is a serious risk of a dangerous, global nuclear buildup in the years ahead. At the same time, the norm against nuclear explosive testing is at risk due to inaction on ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by nine holdout states, including China, Russia, and the United States, and President Donald Trump’s threat to resume testing.

Sadly, the conference did not seize the chance to rectify the disarmament deficit. The NPT’s nuclear five methodically forced the removal of any passages that would have committed them begin “negotiations on disarmament” nor even to pursue discussions on an “urgent” basis. Instead, the final draft outcome document vaguely “calls on the nuclear-weapon States to engage in … constructive dialogue on the basis of mutual respect … and notes that such engagement could facilitate future arms control discussions, and help progress towards nuclear disarmament”

The exchanges at the conference also revealed the discord among the nuclear five on how and whether to reduce nuclear risks and nuclear arsenals. The U.S. delegation sought to focus attention on China’s nuclear buildup and said it had proposed “multilateral strategic stability talks” on “transparency, risk reduction, and nuclear testing.” Given the vagueness of the U.S. offer and the complexities of a five-sided negotiation involving states with different force sizes, force structures, nuclear postures, and strategic cultures, this could be a formula for further inaction on disarmament.

For their part, China and Russia expressed regret that the United States had failed to take up opportunities to negotiate a follow-on to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired in February. They urged Washington to actively consider Moscow’s proposal to respect that treaty’s numerical limits for one more year and explore a follow-on agreement “in a responsible manner.”

To improve the chances of success in future arms reduction talks, whether multilateral or bilateral or both, and to prevent unconstrained nuclear competition, all five NPT-recognized nuclear-armed states should agree to a mutual and verifiable freeze of their strategic launchers at their current numbers.

One bright spot was that the vast majority of NPT states-parties insisted, over strong U.S. opposition, on retaining meaningful language in the final draft outcome document supporting the CTBT, strongly opposing the resumption of nuclear testing, and commending the treaty’s international monitoring and verification system. Also, at France’s urging, the U.S., UK, and French delegations issued a statement endorsing talks on “confidence-building measures regarding nuclear explosive test monitoring, including increasing the ability to detect tests of any yield” to ensure that all states comply with the CTBT’s “zero-yield” standard before the treaty enters into force.

Repairing the imperfect but irreplaceable NPT regime and achieving real progress on disarmament is not optional. But it will take time, creativity, and smarter leadership from Washington, greater cooperation and restraint from other nuclear-armed states, and more focused and energetic civil society advocacy to get back on the path to the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.