Twelve countries launched a cross-regional group with the aim of expanding support for negotiating a treaty banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. 

November 2024
By Shizuka Kuramitsu

Twelve countries launched a cross-regional group called Friends of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty on Sept. 23 with the aim of expanding support for negotiating a treaty banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (second from L) looks on as U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken (second from R) speaks during a meeting to launch the Friends of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty group, or FMCT Friends, at UN headquarters in New York in September. (Photo by Bryan R. Smith/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The group, also known as FMCT Friends, consists of Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It kicked off the initiative with a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

In a joint statement, members committed to “work closely together to realize the common objectives of the group, which are to maintain and enhance political attention to [a fissile material cutoff treaty] FMCT as a priority action to forestall a recurrence of a nuclear arms race, and to contribute to expanding the support for the immediate commencement of negotiations…amid the heightened risk of destabilization.”

Further, the group underscored its expectation that the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva should consider negotiations on the proposed treaty “as a matter of priority in its work,” the statement said.

During the launch event, former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed concern that “we are on the brink of a possible reversal of the downward trend in the number of nuclear weapons since the Cold War” and emphasized the importance of an FMCT as a framework to maintain the downward trend “by limiting the quantitative increase in nuclear weapons.”

Kishida said that “[n]ow is the time for strong political will to begin negotiations that materialize” the expert-level discussions that have been underway since U.S. President Bill Clinton proposed the FMCT concept 30 years ago.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the proposed treaty “is the next step on the path to nuclear disarmament.” Although such a treaty “cannot address every nuclear risk…it would limit the unconstrained expansion of nuclear arsenals as well as reduce the nuclear risks they’re bringing,” he said.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry said that the FMCT Friends initiative would involve the participation of nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states. “There was a unanimous support among the participating countries on the commencement of FMCT negotiations and [the] importance of transparency measures and a fissile materials production moratorium” until a treaty enters formally into force, said a Japanese Foreign Ministry official to Arms Control Today.

“We hope to boost political momentum in those areas at the [CD] and are willing to gain a wider support to our initiative,” the official said.

By raising an issue that existing stockpiles of fissile materials should be constrained under a treaty, Pakistan has blocked the start of FMCT negotiations in the CD, a 65-member body that operates by consensus, since May 2009. (See ACT, April 2010.)

Plans to establish the FMCT Friends group was announced by Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa when Tokyo chaired a high-level UN Security Council meeting on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation in March. (See ACT, April 2024.)

A U.S. judge ruled that the National Nuclear Security Administration violated the law by failing to properly analyze alternatives that consider; environmental impacts.

November 2024
By Xiaodon Liang

A U.S. District Court judge ruled on Sept. 30 that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to conduct a proper analysis of alternatives that takes into consideration environmental impacts after significantly modifying plans for plutonium pit production in 2018.

U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration plans for plutonium pit production at a new facility at Savannah River, South Carolina, ran into a snag when a federal judge ruled that the agency violated national environmental policy. (Photo by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions)

The civil suit against the NNSA was brought in South Carolina by nuclear safety advocates in cooperation with a group representing the Gullah-Geechee slave-descendant community of the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Following the decision, the court has instructed the two sides to consult and jointly recommend an appropriate remedy.

U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis dismissed four of the plaintiffs’ claims for lack of standing. But, in assessing the remaining claim, Lewis agreed with the plaintiffs that the NNSA “failed to conduct a proper study on the combined effects of their two-site strategy,” according to her written opinion.

In May 2018, the NNSA announced that it would adopt a plan to produce 30 plutonium pits per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory and 50 pits per year at a new facility at Savannah River, South Carolina, now known as the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility.

The plaintiffs criticized the NNSA’s decision to continue relying on a 2008 comprehensive study of environmental impacts at the Los Alamos site, prepared at a time when the NNSA was considering alternatives for consolidating pit production at one location.

The defendants, named in the suit as the NNSA, Administrator Jill Hruby, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, argued that two separate supplemental environmental impact studies for pit production at Savannah River and Los Alamos finalized in 2020 brought the agency in compliance with the environmental act.

But Lewis found this approach insufficient for studying combined environmental effects. As the plaintiffs pointed out in their initial claim, the 2020 studies only examined alternative production options at each site without comparing siting alternatives.

In a statement to Arms Control Today, an NNSA spokesperson said that the agency has “reviewed the Court’s ruling and [is] supporting the Department of Justice as it prepares to meet and confer with the plaintiffs, as ordered. At this point in the judicial process, work on the program continues.”

Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a plaintiff in the suit, said in an email to Arms Control Today that nuclear safety organizations first wrote to the NNSA expressing concerns about compliance with the environmental act in October 2018.

The NNSA “never deigned to respond to us. They have had more than ample time since then to comply with the law,” Coghlan added.

The other plaintiffs in the suit are Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and Tom Clements.

The four claims dismissed for lack of standing noted some of the particular environmental concerns that the plaintiffs believe remain unaddressed in the absence of a comprehensive environmental study of the two-site plan. These concerns are the ability of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to accommodate radioactive pit-production by-products and the health risks posed by storage of radioactive waste at pit production sites raised in a 2020 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report.

According to the NNSA fiscal 2025 budget request, the total cost of construction at the Savannah River facility may now be $18-25 billion. In the September 2024 edition of the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, the agency said the facility is likely to begin operations at some point between fiscal years 2033 and 2035.

The September report also indicated that the NNSA foresees spending around $735 billion on nuclear weapons activities over the next 25 years, counted in future-year dollars. This is an increase from a projection of roughly $655 billion last year.

Some of the increase is attributable to the inclusion in the 25-year projection of a notional future weapons program, the Submarine Launched Warhead, which the agency believes will cost between $52.4 billion and $65 billion and enter production in the 2040s. This warhead would succeed the W76-1 and W76-2 warheads, which currently are deployed on U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

The other deployed SLBM warhead, the W88, already has a successor, known as the Future Strategic Sea-Based Warhead, which is projected for entry into service in the 2040s. These two notional warheads would supplement the W93 warhead, which is now in the requirements-setting and design phase, for deployment on ballistic missile submarines.

In an Oct. 1 statement, the NNSA announced that Los Alamos has produced the first plutonium pit for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warhead program. It will replace the W78 ICBM warhead and be deployed on the Air Force’s costly new Sentinel ICBM, initially alongside the older W87-0. (See ACT, September 2024.)

The statement said that the pit was the first to be “diamond-stamped,” indicating compliance with production standards, but the laboratory also produced nine “developmental” pits in fiscal 2023, according to the September stewardship report, and six the year prior.

The W87-1 warhead modification program is expected to cost $15.9 billion

Experts Dismiss Speculation Over Iran Nuclear Testing

November 2024

International monitors have determined that Iran experienced two earthquakes on Oct. 5 and did not test a nuclear weapon.

Online suspicions about possible testing were sparked when one of the earthquakes struck a region centered in Aradan, about 100 kilometers from Tehran, and emanated from a depth of 10 kilometers.

Amid heightened tensions between Iran and Israel, there already had been speculation that Israel might strike Iranian nuclear facilities in response to an Iranian missile attack against Israel on Oct. 1. A nuclear test could be an additional provocation for Israel to attack Iran.

On Oct. 7, the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which monitors nuclear tests and other activity internationally through hydroacoustic, radionuclide, seismic, and infrasound detection technology, released data and analysis confirming that recorded waveforms from the earthquakes are consistent with previous earthquakes in the northern region of Iran. Tehran also dismissed the nuclear testing rumor.

“Data gathered by more than 25 stations in our global monitoring network, known as the International Monitoring System…was analyzed by our team in Vienna. The analysis indicated that the two events were consistent with previous earthquakes in this area in Iran,” said CTBTO Executive Secretary Robert Floyd, according to the organization’s website.

When completed, the CTBTO monitoring system will consist of 321 monitoring stations and 16 laboratories hosted by 89 countries around the globe. About 90 percent of these facilities are already operational, providing a steady flow of real-time data. The work of the CTBTO highlights the stabilizing role that can be played by scientific and technical experts in times of high political tensions.—SHIZUKA KURAMITSU 

U.S. Missile Battery to Remain in the Philippines 

November 2024

A battery of U.S. ground-launched missiles first deployed in the Philippines in April to participate in a military exercise will remain there indefinitely, U.S. and Philippine officials said.

The commander of U.S. Army Pacific, Gen. Charles Flynn, said in an interview with Defense News on Oct. 14 that the battery will remain in the Philippines “for the time being.” Flynn’s remark confirms prior statements made Sept. 25 by anonymous Philippine officials to the Associated Press that the battery may remain until next April, when the United States and the Philippines are scheduled to conduct annual joint military exercises.

The medium-range missile battery is equipped to launch Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, with an estimated range of more than 1,600 kilometers, and the multipurpose Standard Missile-6. The ground-launched variant of the Tomahawk would have violated the now-defunct 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (See ACT, May 2024.)

In the interview, Flynn said the Philippines had requested the continued presence of the missile battery. The state-run Philippine News Agency reported on Sept. 26 that Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, wanted the missile battery to stay “forever” and that the military is interested in purchasing its own medium-range missile battery and other similar missile systems. The Philippine military took delivery of the Indian BrahMos ground-launched anti-ship cruise missile in April. That missile has an estimated range of up to 900 kilometers.

The decision comes after a summer of tense confrontations between Philippine and Chinese naval forces in the South China Sea, where the two countries have overlapping maritime and territorial claims. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Oct. 11 that China “firmly opposes” the deployment of the missile system in the Asia-Pacific region.—XIAODON LIANG

In September, UN member states adopted an important, wide-ranging document designed to reaffirm the UN Charter, reinvigorate multilateralism, boost implementation of existing commitments, and advance concrete solutions to global challenges, including the existential threats posed by nuclear weapons.

November 2024
By Daryl G. Kimball

In September, UN member states adopted an important, wide-ranging document designed to reaffirm the UN Charter, reinvigorate multilateralism, boost implementation of existing commitments, and advance concrete solutions to global challenges, including the existential threats posed by nuclear weapons.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 24, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

In the “Pact for the Future” document, UN member states expressed their “deep concern” over the state of nuclear disarmament and reaffirmed support for the common goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and for the fulfillment of respective nuclear disarmament obligations and commitments in the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and elsewhere. They also agreed on the need to “take all steps to prevent nuclear war.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that the pact represents the “first agreed multilateral support for nuclear disarmament in more than a decade.”

At a time of unprecedented geopolitical division and severe challenges to the five core nuclear norms (no nuclear use, no threats of use, no nuclear testing, no nuclear weapons buildups, and nonproliferation), the pact represents an important breakthrough that all states, particularly the United States, must build on through specific, sustained actions.

Most urgently, as Russian leaders continue to warn that they may resort to using nuclear weapons if the United States or other allies of Ukraine cross Russia’s increasingly fuzzy redlines for nuclear use, all states need to fulfill their pledges to “make every effort” to avert the danger of nuclear war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and his warnings of possible nuclear weapons use in response to non-nuclear threats have raised the specter of a nuclear conflict in ways not seen in the post-Cold War era. If nuclear weapons are used, even on a “limited” scale, in a conflict involving nuclear-armed adversaries, there is no guarantee that they would not trigger nuclear escalation with catastrophic global consequences.

In 2017, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said, “[I]t’s hard to envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be necessary or make sense.” During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden pledged to adopt a policy that states that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear weapons use.

Unfortunately, once Biden was in the White House, his 2022 Nuclear Posture Review fell short of his pledges. As with Russia’s formal nuclear weapons declaratory policy, Biden’s policy retains the option of using nuclear weapons to respond to non-nuclear threats under extreme circumstances.

Biden and his successor have a duty to do more to reinforce the global norm against nuclear weapons use. Rather than trying to distinguish between what it calls Russia's irresponsible nuclear threat rhetoric and its own “defensive” nuclear deterrence signaling, the United States should join non-nuclear-weapon states who condemn nuclear use and threats of nuclear use of any kind as dangerous, disproportionate, illegal, and as the Group of 20 leaders said in 2022 and 2023, “inadmissible.”

In addition, the next U.S. president should take overdue steps to extend legally binding guarantees against nuclear attack against NPT non-nuclear-weapon states-parties. The United States has signed but not ratified the protocols to the South Pacific, African, and Central Asian nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties, which commit the major nuclear-armed states to extend negative nuclear security assurances to the zone states.

For more than a decade, the Senate has failed to advance formal consideration of the protocols to these three treaties, making the United States the only nuclear-weapon state and NPT signatory that has failed to do so. In light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s repeated threats of nuclear use, the United States finally must act to bring into force the protocols’ legally binding assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

The president also has a duty to support serious efforts to underscore that the uniquely catastrophic dangers of nuclear war must be avoided. For example, Washington should actively support a new UN General Assembly resolution advanced by Ireland and New Zealand that seeks to establish a panel of 21 scientific experts to conduct a new study on the potential effects of nuclear war. It seeks to respond to growing calls from scientific bodies and organizations from around the world for a comprehensive, up-to-date understanding of such impacts.

This resolution would provide serious new analysis and information about why a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought and would create new impetus for overdue action on nuclear disarmament. As Biden noted in his statement congratulating the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, Nihon Hidankyo, for winning the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, “[T]he catastrophic human toll of nuclear weapons [is a] story that humanity needs to hear.”

Given that the risk of nuclear war is greater than at any point since the Cold War, the United States, along with other responsible states, must lead the way to reinforce the taboo against nuclear weapons use and threats of nuclear weapons use.
 

PRESS RELEASE | Arms Control Association Congratulates 2024 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Description

The Arms Control Association warmly congratulates Nihon Hidankyo (the Japan Confederation of A & H Sufferers) for the well-deserved recognition from the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee. 

Body

For Immediate Release: October 11, 2024

Media Contacts: Daryl G. Kimball, executive director, (202) 462-8270 ext. 107; Shizuka Kuramitsu, (202) 463-8270 ext. 104

(WASHINGTON, DC)—“The Arms Control Association warmly congratulates Nihon Hidankyo (the Japan Confederation of A & H Bomb Sufferers) for the well-deserved recognition from the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee for their persistent efforts on behalf of the Hibakusha to move the world closer to the peace and security of a world free of nuclear weapons,” said executive director, Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director.

“The Nobel Peace Prize award to the Hibakusha in this, the 80th anniversary year of the U.S. atomic attacks on the people living in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, serves as a reminder of the devastating human impacts of nuclear weapons use, nuclear weapons development and production, nuclear testing, and the risk of a global thermonuclear war,” said Shizuka Kuramitsu, research assistant, and native of Hiroshima.
 
“As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human civilization remains precariously tethered to the existence of nuclear weapons and the threat they might be used again,” Kuramitsu cautioned.
 
“This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is also a call to action for the leaders of the world’s nuclear-armed states and nonnuclear weapon states, to implement concrete steps to refrain from nuclear threats, avert dangerous and destabilizing nuclear competition, and to return to the negotiating table to conclude effective risk reduction and disarmament measures,” Kimball said.
 

Unfortunately, all of the major nuclear weapon states are spending tens of billions of dollars modernizing their arsenals. Some, including Russia, are recklessly threatening nuclear first use. And the regime designed to prevent the use, testing, and proliferation of nuclear weapons is under stress. The last remaining agreement limiting the world's two largest arsenals, the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), will expire on February 5, 2026. "We need to see disarmament commitments translated into action,” Kimball urged.

In June, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned: "We need to move back from the nuclear brink.”
 

At the September Summit for the Future, UN member states, including the major nuclear weapon states, expressed “deep concern over the state of nuclear disarmament” and promised to advance the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons; uphold “our respective obligations and commitments” set out in treaties, protocols, and established norms; and “take all steps to prevent nuclear war.”

“To start, we call upon Presidents Biden and Putin to pledge that their nations will not increase their arsenals even after New START expires; we urge China, France, and the United Kingdom to pledge not to increase their deadly stockpiles, and for all five to pledge not to threaten nuclear weapons use. These steps would reduce tensions and create the conditions to advance nuclear disarmament involving all states," Kimball said.

"We also call upon the leaders of the world’s nuclear-armed states, as well as Japan and other states that subscribe to nuclear deterrence theory, to recognize the experience of the Hibakusha, reaffirm their message that nuclear weapons must be eliminated before they eliminate all of us, and congratulate Nihon Hidankyo for the Nobel Peace Prize honor," Kimball urged.
 
As Japan’s former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at the G7 Summit and on other occasions: "Conveying the reality of the nuclear attack is important as a starting point for all nuclear disarmament efforts.”
 
“Japan's leaders should take this opportunity to contribute more to necessary efforts to advance nuclear disarmament, provide more support for research of nuclear effects, and provide more assistance for victims and survivors of nuclear weapons use and nuclear testing,” Kuramitsu added.
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