March 2025
By Libby Flatoff

Hundreds of workers who maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal were fired as part of a purge of federal workers by the Trump administration, which is now rushing to rehire many of them.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 11 to promptly "initiate large-scale reductions in force," and two days later, some 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, were fired as part of the broader layoffs.

The decision to rehire almost all of those dismissed from their jobs came after sharp criticism from the public, experts, and members of Congress. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), responding to the cuts on X, wrote, “The Trump Administration fired the U.S. nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s entire weapons stockpile. This isn’t government efficiency. It’s incompetence. They are making America less safe.”

On its website, NNSA describes its mission as “to ensure the United States maintains a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear stockpile,” which its Office of Defense Programs carries out through the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program.

With a $25 billion annual budget, the agency maintains, refurbishes, and secures more than 3,000 nuclear warheads and oversees the production of new nuclear warheads. It employs 2,000 staff and manages more than 55,000 contractors.

According to the Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan, “since many roles within the nuclear security enterprise require specialized training or years of experience to develop proficiency, effectively training personnel, then retaining them, is essential to success.”

Rob Plonski, an NNSA deputy division director, discussed the layoffs in a LinkedIn post Feb. 15. “We cannot expect to project strength, deterrence, and world dominance while simultaneously stripping away the federal workforce …. Years of knowledge and experience are being lost, with no clear strategy to replenish that expertise at the pace required to maintain operational excellence,” he wrote.

Speaking to reporters Feb. 13, Trump suggested scaling back nuclear modernization as a way to reduce government spending. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many, you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” he said.

There are an estimated 12,400 nuclear weapons worldwide, including 5,225 held by the United States.

March 2025
By Kelsey Davenport

The Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction will focus this year on developing cross-cutting strategies to reduce risk and expanding engagement with states outside of the multinational initiative, Canada announced.

The Global Partnership, established in 2002 by the Group of Eight industrialized states, is focused on preventing chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons proliferation. As chair of the 31-member initiative for 2025, Canada is responsible for setting priorities for the initiative’s work.

In a statement on its plans, Canada said the initiative has had a “transformative impact” on weapons of mass destruction [WMD] threat-reduction efforts because of its “unique combination of perseverance and adaptability.”

To ensure that the Global Partnership can address current and future challenges, Canada will focus on developing a strategy for addressing concerns that cut across CBRN threats, “particularly WMD-related disinformation, technologies, and strategic trade controls.”

Canada also will look to engage states and organizations that currently do not participate in the initiative but “have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to contribute meaningfully to WMD threat reduction.”

One of the partnership’s key tools for reducing CBRN risk is a matchmaking process that connects offers of funding and expertise from initiative members to other states or groups working on specific WMD-threat reduction projects.

According to an annex of projects from 2024, 18 Global Partnership states helped implement 424 projects in 159 countries. Italy, the 2024 chair, prioritized a different set of issues, including support for Ukraine and biosecurity efforts (see ACT, March 2024).

The annex documented projects in Ukraine designed to detect and respond to WMD-related threats; strengthen security at nuclear facilities, including rebuilding infrastructure around the Chernobyl complex; and support for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s work in Ukraine. It also noted that partner states supported 153 biosecurity projects, including programs to strengthen biosecurity and biosafety. 

March 2025

The U.S. National Security Administration (NNSA) was ordered by a federal judge to complete a nation-wide programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium “pit” bomb core production within two-and-a half years after several nonprofit groups challenged the agency's failure to do so. The groups announced the agreement Jan. 16 in a joint statement.

The lawsuit was filed by Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, SC; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, NM; Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), based in Livermore, CA; and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia.. It argued that NNSA violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not properly assessing alternatives before proceeding with pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Savannah River Site in South Carolina. In September 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lewis Geiger ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, leading to a settlement requiring the programmatic environmental statement and public participation (see ACT, November 2024).

According to the groups’ statement, the agreement would effectively halt preparations for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site. It would give NNSA two-and-a-half years to complete the environmental statement and hold public hearings before a final decision. Citizens can comment on NNSA’s draft statement and voice health and environmental concerns. In the meantime, NNSA is prohibited from installing classified equipment, introducing nuclear materials, or constructing key facilities at the Savannah River Site, where the agency is planning to produce pits by the mid-2030s. Pit production could continue at the Los Alamos lab. —SHAGHAYEGH CHRIS ROSTAMPOUR

March 2025

The head of the international chemical-weapons watchdog agency visited Damascus in February, marking a major step toward resetting relations with Syria after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

Fernando Arias, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and his team met with the interim president and foreign minister of Syria’s caretaker government in what the OPCW described as “long, productive and very open” discussions on Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Since 2022, the United Nations has bemoaned the lack of progress by the Syrian government in meeting its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Last year’s overthrow of Assad and his government by Syrian rebels is seen as a new opening. (See ACT, January/February 2025.) Arias presented Syrian officials with an action plan drafted by the OPCW Technical Secretariat to help Syria address the remaining issues with its chemical weapons declaration.

After years of denying the program's existence, Syria submitted a declaration of its chemical weapons and facilities to the OPCW in September 2013. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that Syria’s entire declared stockpile of 1,308 metric tons of chemical agent and precursor chemicals had been destroyed. The OPCW determined, however, that the Syrian government continued to use chemical weapons even after the bulk of the declared stockpile had been eliminated.

“Today’s visit to #Syria marks a reset,” Arias said in a Feb. 8 post on X. “After 11 years of obstruction by the previous authorities, the Syrian caretaker authorities have a chance to turn the page and meet Syria’s obligations under the Convention.”—MINA ROZEI

March 2025
By Daryl G. Kimball

It has been barely a month since Inauguration Day, but U.S. President Donald Trump is already moving to reshape longstanding foreign policy, radically alter relationships with the nation’s closest allies, and upend its role as a bulwark against an expansionist, authoritarian Russia.

Not only has Trump, ignoring all facts, blamed Ukraine for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion; he appears to be seeking an end to the war on Putin’s terms: ceding Ukrainian territory seized by Russia, denying Kyiv a path to NATO membership, and leaving Ukraine with flimsy security guarantees. Trump’s posture already has undermined the credibility of U.S. security commitments to its NATO allies and could lead to further instability in Europe.

At the same time, a dialogue between Moscow and Washington could lead to negotiations to maintain or lower current limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals before the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires in February 2026.

In January, Trump expressed support for nuclear talks with China and Russia in terms not uttered by a Republican politician in recent memory. In response to a question about China-U.S. relations, he said: “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about .... So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” The Kremlin replied that it wants to resume the nuclear dialogue “as soon as possible.”

To translate Trump’s denuclearization comments into concrete results, his team will need to craft a more practical and effective approach than the one Trump pursued in his first term. In 2020, Trump tried and failed to launch three-way talks involving China, Russia, and the United States. He then refused to agree to a simple extension of New START, leaving it to Putin and President Joe Biden to do so during Biden’s first days in office in 2021.

Negotiating on nuclear arms control with Russia is always difficult. Achieving a new comprehensive framework could require sustained talks over many months, if not longer. The two sides have sparred for years about further cuts to their strategic stockpiles, the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, substrategic nuclear weapons, and missile defenses, which Russia believes could negate much of its offensive retaliatory force.

The smartest approach would be for Putin and Trump to strike a simple, informal deal to maintain the existing caps set by New START (1,550 deployed warheads on no more than 700 strategic delivery systems) after the treaty expires, as long as the other side agrees to do so. They could agree to resume data exchanges and inspections, or simply monitor compliance through national technical means of intelligence.

Such a deal would reduce tensions, forestall a costly arms race that no one can win, and buy time for talks on a broader, more durable, framework deal. An interim arrangement to cap or cut their strategic nuclear arsenals would provide new diplomatic leverage to curb the buildup of China’s arsenal, now about 600 nuclear warheads, some 400 of which can be delivered on long-range missiles.

In the absence of such new limits, Russia and the United States could significantly increase the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads by uploading additional warheads onto existing land- and sea-based ballistic missiles. Any Russian and U.S. buildup would destabilize the mutual balance of nuclear terror, strain the already exorbitant and behind-schedule U.S. nuclear modernization program, and prompt China to accelerate its own nuclear buildup.

Although Trump has decried the enormous costs of nuclear weapons—now projected to consume more than $800 billion in the next decade—he also has directed the U.S. Defense Department to make a priority of upgrading the nuclear arsenal and expanding missile defenses, ostensibly to defend against a Chinese or Russian strategic nuclear attack.

This approach would only stiffen resistance in Beijing and Moscow to limits on their own offensive nuclear forces and encourage them to adapt their nuclear forces to overwhelm new U.S. missile defenses. A new U.S. nuclear buildup would not achieve “peace through strength.” It would be madness.

Halting the cycle of spiraling nuclear tensions is in every nation’s interest and is every nation’s obligation. Under Article VI of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Russia and the United States, as well as China, France, and the United Kingdom, are legally obligated to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

Even if Trump appeases Russia on Ukraine, it is still in the U.S. and international security interest, as well as Trump’s own interest, to curb nuclear excess and reduce the nuclear danger. If Trump can pull off an agreement to cap or reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals, that would be a significant and surprising step forward in a time of global turmoil.