ABSTRACT
Ms Laura Holgate has been a major force in enhancing nuclear security since the end of Cold War, starting her career in the US Clinton Administration and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), and devoting herself to the Obama Administration. In this interview, she spoke very frankly about her personal history and her experiences working with both administrations, particularly with the Obama administration. The following interview consists of four parts: (1) Ms Holgate’s personal history and interests; (2) the evolution of nuclear security; (3) major achievements of the Obama administration, especially the Nuclear Security Summit; and (4) issues left behind and the role of Japan.
My Early Days
: Thank you for joining us. Today, we would like to ask you about achievements and issues left behind by the Obama Administration in the area of nuclear security. Before moving into the subject, we would like to start with your personal history. What has brought you to this field?
: Well, I think it starts with growing up in Kansas City, which was not a very international place at that time. But my father was a pilot for the airlines, and so that gave us access to the world in a way that most of my peers and schoolmates didn’t have a chance to see. It really helped me understand traveling throughout the United States and internationally how much more there was in the world. And so, I really was raised with an awareness much more broad than my hometown, and that really made me want to work in international affairs in some way as I thought about what kind of career I might want to have.
And as I started university in 1983, the big issues of the day were very much the nuclear issues. It was the height of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was rattling nuclear sabers. The nuclear freeze moment was very active, such as the European reaction to the Pershing missile deployment and the Strategic Defense Initiative.
And an important popular culture moment was the fall of 1983 when the movie The Day After was shown on national television. And I think it affected a lot of people. I know for a lot of my peers and people who saw that film, it really made an impact on them. And it made a special impact on me because the ground zero in the movie was just a few miles from my hometown. It was Lawrence, Kansas. And I was a freshman at college, so I was away from home for – it wasn’t the first time I was away from home but it was an emotional time. And I remember it striking me very much at the heart of that. And then, that really solidified my desire. I was already hoping to be a Sovietologist and I was taking Russian class and taking a Soviet foreign policy class. But I got a very poor grade in the Soviet foreign policy. And so, I said, ‘Well, you know, maybe this Sovietology thing is not for me.’
And so, I moved to a more generic kind of international relations focus as my university major. I wrote my thesis on terrorism, as it turned out – the terrorism as we understood it in the mid-’80s, which is very different than the terrorism we face today. But that really instilled in me a desire to work in international relations in the peace and security and arms control arena. And I knew that I was going to need a master’s degree to be able to compete effectively here in D.C., and so I ended up going to MIT for my master’s degree in what’s now called the Security Studies program, what was then called the Defense and Arms Control Studies program. And I was able to take courses that were very directly in my area of interest: History of Arms Control, Defense Politics, Interservice Rivalry and DOD Budgeting, etc., and I had a chance to work with some really great professors. It was from 1988 to 1990.
And then, my husband was also at MIT doing a chemical engineering Ph.D. He wasn’t finished with his degree yet, and so, I had a couple of years to fill. And I ended up at the Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, which was led by Ash Carter. I started working with Ash in a project he was working on with Bill Perry, who was then at Stanford. And obviously in 1990, 1991 it started to be very clear that the Soviet Union was collapsing, and they really started to think about new ways of dealing with and managing the nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction threats that come from the Soviet Union. At that time it shifted very quickly, where the threats were from the weakness rather than the strength of the Soviet Union, and the tools to deal with those threats had more to do with cooperation than with confrontation.
Out of that insight came the concept of Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR). And Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar had just been to Russia. They had toured Moscow with Andrei Kokoshin. They had seen themselves the tanks in the streets. They met with Gorbachev and asked him when he was in Georgia – not quite in exile but not completely under his own authority – did he have full control of the Soviet arsenal at that time. And the way Senator Nunn tells it, he said, ‘He looked away. And that was all the answer I needed.’
The Senators came back very motivated, very concerned, and they happened to be having a meeting with Ash Carter and Bill Perry, but Senator Nunn started talking about what was on the top of his mind. And he said, ‘Ash, Bill, have you done anything to think about this?’ And they said, ‘Well, interesting you should say that. We’ve been working on this project.’ And so it moved very quickly from being some research ideas to being the text of legislation. That became the Nunn-Lugar Soviet Threat Reduction Act which created the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program.Footnote1
I was the project coordinator for that effort, so I was organizing the researchers and the documents and the conferences that we were doing and the meetings that we were having. I was really fortunate to be right there on the ground floor of that initiative. And then, I followed Ash into the Pentagon and was able to actually run the program in the mid-’90s.
Threat of Nuclear Terrorism
: Very good. So the next stage is the Obama administration.
: Yes.
: So, what was the impression when you first met him? Did you have a chance to talk about this issue?
: My first meeting with the president was on a very specific issue related to nuclear security. I don’t remember exactly when it was. I was one of 200 campaign advisors on nonproliferation. But I was working at the Nuclear Threat Initiative at that time so I was supporting it kind of at a distance. I wasn’t close to the campaign. I joined the National Security Council staff in July of 2009, and so I wasn’t there at the very beginning of the administration. I was not part of the Prague speech drafting team, but I listened to it and was very pleased to hear President Obama’s vision. The inclusion of the nuclear security summit wasn’t a surprise. As you know, he had made a campaign promise about hosting a summit about nuclear security.
I probably didn’t meet President Obama until much later that fall. I was working for Gary Samore at that time, who had talked to the president about the nuclear security summit. But we didn’t have a lot more guidance besides the Prague speech. I was handed this very slim folder when I showed up in July that said ‘Nuclear security summit.’ There were a couple of pieces of paper in there.
: Who came up with the idea of a nuclear security summit? Did you?
: It was part of his campaign.
I recently went back to some of my notes from this large group of nonproliferation advisors during the campaign and I found a memo that suggested that Obama, when he was still a candidate, should do a speech about nuclear security, and there were some building blocks of what might be in that speech, and there was a reference to a summit. And it started out as a P5 summit in the first draft of that memo, but then as the memo matured it started saying ‘P5 and other interested countries.’ And I don’t know who shifted that.
: Oh, that’s interesting.
: So, the summit concept was part of the campaign, part of the Prague speech. Gary Samore had offered me the job in February, and so we had of course been talking through that spring and summer before I was actually able to get onboard, so I knew the summit was happening. And I knew that my role once I got there would be as the sous-Sherpa (under-Sherpa), which Gary would be the Sherpa for the summit preparations.
It was a topic in which I had a deep expertise. Gary and I had worked together in the Clinton administration, so he knew of me and my work and we had stayed in touch during the Bush administration while he was in London at IISS. And I was a kind of a logical choice. Obviously, it was a thrill for me. It was a long-time aspiration to work on the National Security Council.
: When did the concept of ‘nuclear security’ become as a key concept? I knew it became a big issue actually after 2001.
: Well, it was part of the Nunn-Lugar program, even at the beginning. If you go back and look at it, we called Material Protection, Control and Accounting (MPCA). But it was about securing material, obviously. But in the ‘90s it was mainly about dealing with the unique and specific situation associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And making sure that all the weapons returned to Russia safely and securely, and then dealing with the facilities that remained in the other three countries that had nuclear materials. It was a matter of shifting a security mentality, because the Soviet mentality was, if you think about the secret cities and similarly the military installations, it was secrecy. It was ‘Hide them. Hide them from the population. Hide them from NATO.’
That leads you to one very specific way of thinking about security. If the threat is external, if the threat is at some level existential, it’s not a limited raid of some nature. It’s a very different mindset from thinking about as the society began to become more open. We all had hopes in the 1990s that Russia would become an open democratic free-market society, and that brings with it a reduction in the ability of the government to keep secrets. These secret cities became not secret anymore. Once you stopped relying on secrecy, then you have to have a whole new way of thinking and that is much more similar to the United States’ approach of security of defense in depth, of personnel reliability, where it has to do with the health and lifestyle of the individual rather than their ideological purity. You have to think about insiders in a different way, and you have to think about non-state actors. That was a little bit in our minds in the 1990s but not at the top of mind.
But then 9/11 happened, and then that very much brings the non-state actor threat to the forefront. But it also globalizes the sense of threat.
Certainly, we needed to keep doing what we were doing in Russia, and increase the pace and urgency of that. That was eventually manifested in the Bratislava agreement between President Bush and President Putin about increasing and enhancing and opening up the scope of work between the US and Russia. You also saw the beginnings of what became the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) and the recognition that fissile material anywhere could be at risk. What we learned on 9/11 about terrorists is it’s a very different kind of terrorism than what we had in the ‘70s and ‘80s. You had now terrorists that are wealthy, well-resourced, very sophisticated in their operations, and apocalyptic in their world view. They were saying, ‘We are owed two to four million deaths to compensate for the deaths that we have suffered over the millennia.’ And the only way you kill two to four million people is with weapons of mass destruction.
That really focused attention on where might the raw material of those kinds of weapons be found? And what can we do to address it? And here NTI was on the forefront of that, such as the Project Vinca,Footnote2 where NTI and the flexibility of our resources created an opportunity to bring together what had been a bunch of disparate programs at the Energy Department and the State Department that were not focused from a nuclear terrorism point of view. They were more focused from an environmental point of view, from a housekeeping way of thinking, of ‘we sent it out so we should bring it back’ kind of mentality. And that really shifted to a recognition that these materials that we’ve sent out through the Atoms for Peace program over the years and so on really – represent a security threat.
And so, what NTI was able to show with Project Vinca was to bring together a bunch of different strains of resources from within the Energy Department, the State Department, the IAEA, and then the NTI to address a whole suite of concerns and challenges that were there. And then, we went to the Energy Department and we said, ‘You need to have a whole program here. NTI can’t fix this at a global scale but we’ve shown you how it can work and we’ve helped you see the national security imperative here.’ And a couple of years later they were able to break down some of those barriers, collect all of those programs under the broad umbrella of the GTRI. So that was one of the major ways in which the 9/11 insights really affected the nuclear security conception.
The Evolution of Nuclear Security
: Now, how did the Prague speech enter this fight against nuclear threats?
: I think what the Prague speech showed and what the nuclear security summits recognized is at that point we had almost two decades of cooperation with Russia and the former Soviet states, but then also more globally during the Bush administration, during the 2000s. The Summit was a recognition that the work that still needed to be done in nuclear security was hard and in many cases expensive, and that you don’t achieve those kinds of decisions percolating from the bottom up. You need top level leadership. And the president recognized that getting the leaders in a room would be not only beneficial to the leaders themselves in terms of helping them understand more about the threats that they should be more aware of in terms of the responsibility that they have to their people, but also that when the leaders are engaged that empowers the staff level experts, because the leaders don’t want to show up at something like that either ignorant or empty-handed.
So, we really focused on the notion of the specific deliverables, what became known as the ‘house gifts.’
: I see. Yes, it was a very good idea.
: For all of the countries we did a very deep analysis within the US government, and asked; ‘What would be the most impactful thing that this country could do to contribute to the nuclear security mission?’ And sometimes it was a treaty ratification. Sometimes it was resources for the IAEA. Many times it was dealing with their own materials. Sometimes it was a regulatory improvement. Each country had its own characteristics – everyone was at different levels of sophistication and knowledge and behavior and had different history. Each country had different types of materials on their territory. And so, we really came up with a customized set of wish lists and used the summit process to work those bilaterally and in a very detailed way.
So, that was one set of goals, was to inspire countries and give them a reason to make some very specific, tangible changes.
The second goal – and I put these on equal footing – the second goal was the institutional goal, – I call them the four Es: to elevate, empower, enhance, and energize the enduring international institutions working on nuclear security.
We specifically wanted to create an environment that the UN, especially in connection with UN Resolution 1540, and the IAEA, Interpol, (which was an insight of the Koreans in the second summit because of the nuclear forensics and the law enforcement angle on the smuggling side), the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism would be lifted up. We had to talk to all those institutions and initiatives because not every Summit participant was a member of everything. We wanted to engage those structures in the process.
Because there’s really no institutional structure for the Global Partnership and the Global Initiative; it’s a very lightweight structure and they’re not formal organizations. So, we wanted to really leave all those organizations in a stronger position and therefore, to engage them explicitly in the summit process. We had both the tangible outcomes at the national level and then improving the key elements of the global nuclear security architecture at the institutional and multilateral level.
: Then, we would like to move to the next question. Now a series of the Nuclear Security Summits is over,Footnote3 what do you think about its achievements and what has not been achieved?
: Well, there’s a lot in both columns. The achievements include over 935 house gifts – I mean, if you add up for the four summits the specific commitments that countries made.
: Over nine hundred. Wow.
: The Fissile Materials Working Group, is drafting a scorecard (Kutchesfahani, Davenport, and Connolly Citation2018) on the implementation of the house gifts over the four summits. But right before the final summit, when they were looking at implementation of the three summits, there was something like 80 percent success in terms of pledges being met, which is astonishing if you think about any other global summit. It was a very high level of achievement.
Those were all kinds of things. Japan made some of, obviously, the most significant ones over the course of the summits in terms of the very first summit setting up the Center of Excellence. And then, of course, an unintended benefit of the Fukushima response and the regulatory update to really enhance the nuclear security aspects of Japan’s regulatory infrastructure, which was hugely impactful. Then, in the context of the last couple of summits, the commitment to remove the large amount of highly enriched uranium, to send that back to the United States, and so on. So, some really meaningful commitments from Japan.
And similar in other countries. As we think about what’s going on in the Ukraine, how critical it was that we removed that highly enriched uranium in Kharkiv, because that’s one of the cities that’s now engaged in this instability. It wasn’t unstable in 2010 when we asked the president of Ukraine to do that. It wasn’t unstable in 2012 when we finished the project. This is why I use that as an example when we talk about – and I know this is one of the upcoming questions – about high risk. But then, because risk can change quickly, you have to take advantage of opportunities to permanently reduce threats. And we used the summit as a big opportunity to try to make progress on specific challenges. So, there were 17 countries that became completely HEU-free, and other countries that made significant reductions, obviously, like Japan. So, those are permanent outcomes.
And in fact, if you look at it regionally and you add up what happened during the summit with what had gone before, you can see that we have the entire South America free of HEU. Southeast Asia is also HEU-free. Indonesia was the last country there. Central and Eastern Europe is HEU-free. Western Europe is not. But Central and Eastern Europe is HEU-free. And Africa is – it’s only one country that has material (HEU) still.
So, those represent permanent threat reduction. The other, I think, really important thing that came out was the increase in IPPASFootnote4 missions. This was something that was a very deliberate effort by the United States and one of our house gifts in the first summit, was that we would invite an IPPAS mission to the United States, which we had never done before. We invited it to our research reactor up in Greenbelt, Maryland, that is operated on HEU. It’s a government reactor. It’s owned by the National Institute for Standards and Technology – NIST. We thought it was really important to show that peer reviews or IPPAS missions weren’t just for countries that needed help but that this was a normal thing for mature nuclear programs and rich countries to learn, and also a chance for the IAEA to learn and collect best practices that they can then share with other countries.
And so, it was a very successful visit. After that, the UK invited an IPPAS mission, France invited IPPAS missions. You started to see the requests for IPPAS missions going up significantly. To me, this is not only good for peer review but it gets at this broader question of the sovereignty concerns around nuclear security. It’s been part of the whole ideology of nuclear security that it’s a country’s own business. What we were trying to do in the summit process was to open that up a little and say, ‘Of course, it’s a national responsibility. But your neighbor has a stake in you doing that job well. Your ally over there whom you’d have come to your defense if your behavior in some way creates a conflict, has a stake. Your rival has a view on this too.’
We were opening the door a little bit to the notion that one’s nuclear security behavior has implications for other countries and that it’s legitimate for them to have an opinion about how well each of us are doing. That implies a responsibility on one’s own part to be a little bit more visible about how one is carrying out one’s nuclear security mechanisms.
Now, this is very easy for the United States. We can’t help but be transparent on these issues. It’s part of the way our Constitution is written in the tension between the executive branch and the legislative branch. The executive branch has to go up to Congress and ask for money.
The budget process is an open process. When we have a security problem, officials have to go up and testify in front of Congress. Think of what happened with the Y-12 break-in with the nun in Tennessee. Usually there’s some kind of a blue ribbon commission to look at that problem. There may be a classified report but there is always a public report. Our press is part of the public visibility and they ask tough questions and they follow up embarrassing stories. All of our nuclear security regulations are public.
Now, obviously details like the classified aspect of a design basis threat for a particular reactor, that’s not public.
But we – the world can see if they choose, if it’s important to them, precisely how we are executing our responsibilities. Most countries are not that transparent.
: That’s true.
: But I think it’s critical that – not because everybody needs to be like the US, but we need to break down these sovereignty barriers a little more.
One more point in the success column are the treaties, which were another priority for us. I was shocked to discover when I first got to the White House that the US had not ratified the 2005 amendment to the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials (CPP).Footnote5 And so, I made that a project to get that done. We didn’t get that done until 2015. It took six years to get that done because we needed legislation to be passed in Congress. But in the process we were putting pressure on other countries to do that, and we went from 20 ratifications in 2009 to 100 ratifications in 2016, which was enough to bring that amendment into force. So, it was clear in April 2016 at the summit that there were enough ratifications. Because the treaty didn’t enter into force until after the ratification sat for 30 days, it entered into force in May, in early May of 2016.
And so, now you have, as you know, a very important level of additional international commitment with those 100 countries.
Another treaty is the International Convention of Suppression on Acts of Nuclear Terror, which already was entered into force because it only needed 20 or so countries to enter into force, but we significantly increased the ratifications of that treaty. Now, that’s a UN treaty, whereas the CPP is an IAEA treaty. So, those were the infrastructure pieces.
Issues Left Behind
: That’s great. So what are unfinished missions?
: I would start with the fact that we really papered over the lack of a common threat perception. Most countries in the world do not actually believe that nuclear terrorism is a real threat. They were willing to go along with us because we were giving them a chance to meet President Obama and this was a conversation they didn’t want to be left out of. There’s language that everyone agreed to in the communique that says nuclear security is the greatest threat or one of the greatest threats – it changed a little bit over the four years. But that was not really true for most of the countries in the room and most of the countries in the world. And what I saw when I went to Vienna is that it really breaks down in a north-south way.
But in 2014 the nuclear security summits were happening as the frustration was growing on the lack of progress on disarmament. We had the New START treaty in 2010, which we all hoped would be just kind of brush clearing and then the US and Russia would get back to a serious negotiation. It turned out that it was a much more exhausting treaty for both countries. And frankly, the US ran out of tools that we could use to get any additional treaty ratified in Congress. And so by 2014 it started to be clear that there was not going to be a lot more US-Russian bilateral disarmament. Everyone else was waiting for one more round, at least, of US-Russian reductions before you started to get into a three-part or a four-part or a five-part or a seven-part negotiation.
And so, that frustration over lack of disarmament progress started to come out in the Summit context. And even though we were trying to keep the nuclear security summit protected from that disarmament debate, because there were other places to have that debate, such as Geneva, New York. But it came in, and it manifested itself in one of the gift baskets in 2014 that was then repeated in 2016, that was very different than the other gift baskets. It was more a declaration. I would call it a cri de coeur from that disarmament group, and where they were saying the largest nuclear threat is nuclear weapons in the hands of the weapon states. And then, they paired that with another sentence that disarmament would eliminate the risk of nuclear terrorism.
Now, those two viewpoints are not shared by the United States, by most of the north in this north-south divide, or by some nuclear states and the nuclear-umbrella states. That lack of shared sense of threat has limited the ability to really drive the summit agenda forward in these enduring institutions, especially in the IAEA. I think that goal of getting a much more shared picture of the threat, we did not fully achieve.
There were some specific goals that we weren’t able to achieve at the national level. For example, I mentioned South Africa being the only country now in Africa that has HEU. We were working really hard to try to move their judgement, to put some attractive packages on the table, to treat it as a commercial deal rather than a security deal because they objected to removal on security grounds. They say, ‘It’s under safeguards.’ Of course, we all know safeguards are not security.
: Right.
: But their point was ‘Why are you worried about this stuff?’ And they didn’t take the terrorism risk seriously. The previous president had been very doctrinaire – he actually said at one of the summits that ‘We will not remove our HEU until all HEU around the world is under safeguards’ or something – he made some dramatic statement about that.
The US-South African relationship was quite poor under Zuma. I think that’s fair to say. So, now we have a new president in South Africa, and hopefully my successors in the White House and in Vienna and at the State Department are thinking about what inducements might be offered to work on that.
So, I think it’s just become such a hot button issue in the IAEA in particular because – we’re trying to increase resources, and then that runs right into the eternal fight in the IAEA between the technical cooperation budget and the 3S budget, and those are in conflict, and you can’t raise one without raising the other and all of that.
Furthermore, the Russians are working very hard to undermine not just nuclear security, but they’re actually working hard to undermine the entire Secretariat and its authority and its resources. Nuclear security is kind of collateral damage in that process. As you know, Russia was not part of the final summit. That was an output of the Ukraine issue. Russia has made it part of their approach in Vienna to undermine US priorities.
: Let’s go to the final question. What do you think is the most imminent threats the world faces? And what’s the role of Japan?
: So, I think the biggest threat is complacency.
Without the leaders meeting, without that political impetus, and because of this lack of shared vision of the threat, the countries that are in denial or who don’t perceive that threat are not going to behave in ways that are productive over the long term. So, I think that’s a very real concern.
Obviously, in terms of countries, we worry very much about Russia because of the massive quantities there, especially when you combine that with the corruption, with the decline in resources specifically for nuclear security, especially as the US-Russian cooperation has disappeared. And then India and Pakistan. Those are to me the top three countries. India and Pakistan are obviously very concerning because of the challenging neighborhood that they’re in, because they’re both increasing production of HEU and plutonium, and because they’re not transparent at all, either with each other or with others about how they work on nuclear security. I do think Pakistan takes it more seriously than India. But I think we need to worry about both of them. So, those are my biggest concerns.
The role of Japan… Japan obviously continues to be a responsible steward of its large amounts of nuclear material. Maintaining that focus over time is challenging for any organization and any country, so that will be an important requirement. There’s more material that will be coming out of use over time. Certainly, the plutonium issue is one where Japan needs to be concerned, and everyone is watching Japan. Coming up with a rational solution for that recognizes the major challenge and expense associated with the security requirements for plutonium, and getting reactors back online so that the material that does exist can be consumed. I think continuing the delay of the Rokkasho facility and sequencing it appropriately with consumption capacity is critical to maintain Japan’s nuclear security leadership.
The briefings that I’ve received from the Japanese government call for Rokkasho to begin operating one year before the new MOX plant. But the new MOX plant is way behind Rokkasho in terms of construction, so the notion that those are going to happen within a year of each other in the near future strikes me as not realistic. It also doesn’t make sense to start producing plutonium a year before you need it given the enormous backlog. If you were starting out from scratch, that would be something different. But there’s 10 tons inside of Japan combined with the 40 tons in Europe, which means that the MOX plant will have plenty to work with for decades if all of that material ends up coming back to Japan, either in plutonium oxide form or in MOX form manufactured in France. So I think it’s hard to imagine the reactor fleet coming online at a scale that would consume that in a very rapid way. Matching consumption to production on plutonium, I think, is an enormous responsibility that Japan has.
I’m a little bit less worried about what’s going on in South Korea from a reprocessing point of view. But obviously, South Korea looks at Japan and says, ‘Why are we held back on reprocessing?’ – by the terms of their agreement with the United States. And under President Moon they seem to be stepping back from the kind of expansive vision of nuclear energy domestically that they had had, and so that certainly calls into question why they would ever launch a commercial-scale reprocessing capacity.
But certainly, the Japanese ongoing commitment to reprocessing makes other countries say, ‘Well, why not me?’
: That’s right.
: And not because of any concern about Japanese responsibility or the non-weapons commitment in the NPT, but just because of the realities of that example.
(Interview took place on 1 March 2018, in Washington DC.)
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tatsujiro Suzuki
Tatsujiro Suzuki was born in 1951. He graduated from the University of Tokyo (1975), from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979) and gained a PhD from the University of Tokyo (1988) in nuclear engineering. He served as Vice Chairman at Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) from 2010 to 2014. He joined RECNA in 2014 and is now the Director. He has been a Council Member of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs since 2014.
Notes
1 The CTR Program was created for the purpose of securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in the former states of the Soviet Union, funded by the legislation that passed in November 1991 under the sponsorship of Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN).
2 In 2002, NTI established a project through which NTI closely worked with the US Department of State, the IAEA, Russia and Serbia to facilitate the transfer of more than 100 pounds of weapons-usable nuclear material in the form of fresh reactor fuel to more secure storage in Russia for elimination through blend down. Vinca is the city of Serbia where HEU was stored in a civilian research reactor with inadequate security. http://www.nti.org/about/projects/project-vinca/ .
3 According to Kutchesfahani, Davenport, and Connolly (Citation2018), the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) process, initiated by US President Barack Obama in 2009 and concluded in April 2016, “brought together more than 50 world leaders at four summits – Washington, D.C. (2010), Seoul (2012), The Hague (2014), and Washington D.C. (2016)”.
4 International Physical Protection Advisory Service (IPPAS). IPPAS, created by the IAEA in 1995, provides peer advice on implementing international instruments and Agency guidance on the protection of nuclear and other radioactive material, associated facilities and associated activities. https://www.iaea.org/services/review-missions/international-physical-protection-advisory-service-ippas.
5 The Convention on the Physical Protection of nuclear Material (CPPNM). The Amendment constitutes an important milestone in international efforts to improve the physical protection of nuclear material and facilities. Whereas the obligations for physical protection under the CPPNM covered nuclear material during international transport, the Amendment to the CPPNM makes it legally binding for States Parties to protect nuclear facilities and material in peaceful domestic use, storage and transport. http://www-ns.iaea.org/conventions/physical-protection.asp .
Reference
- Kutchesfahani, S., K. Davenport, and E. Connolly. 2018. Security Summits: An Overview of State Actions to Curb Nuclear Terrorism 2010–2016. Washington DC: Arms Control Association and Fissile Materials Working Group. https://www.armscontrol.org/sites/default/files/files/Reports/NSS_Report2018_digital.pdf