nuclear-news

World’s safety depends on USA – Russia co-operation

Russia and the U.S. Need to Get Along. The World’s Safety Depends on It. New republic 21 Dec 14  By Josh Cohen It is impossible to overstate the danger that nuclear proliferation posed to the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout the newly independent states, nuclear weapons, as well as their components and storage sites, frequently layunguarded—sometimes because starving interior ministry troops left their posts to search for food. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) was stolen from a submarine base in 1993. Managers of top Russian defense plants offered to sell enriched plutonium to visiting foreign scientists. And a visiting White House official once discovered that enough HEU to build several nuclear bombs was being stored in simple school-like lockers at an institute in Moscow.

That’s why the U.S. implemented the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, under which the U.S. spent billions of dollars to help Moscow secure its nuclear facilities and fissile material. From the removal of 600 kilograms of weapons-grade HEU from an unguarded warehouse in northern Kazakhstan to the construction of a highly secure storage facility near Chelyabinsk, Russia, that holds the equivalent of fissile material from 25,000 nuclear warheads, CTR has been an unambiguous post–Cold War success story.

With relations chilly again due to the crisis in Ukraine, first the U.S. and now Russia have taken steps that threaten to undo decades of nuclear cooperation. We need to be firm with Russia over its incursions in Ukraine, but nothing should be done to jeopardize our cooperation over the greater risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

Our nation’s safety is at stake. Here’s what we should do to protect it………….. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120609/russia-us-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-cooperation-deteriorating

December 22, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general