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“Your association has taken a significant role in fostering public awareness of nuclear disarmament and has led to its advancement.”
– Kazi Matsui
Mayor of Hiroshima
June 2, 2022
Daryl Kimball

Fifty Years Ago, the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Began

Fifty years ago, on Nov. 17, 1969, the United States and the Soviet Union launched the first-ever Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki, Finland. The chief American negotiator was Gerard Smith, who had been appointed the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency by then-president Richard Nixon. Smith’s opening message that day: “The limitation of strategic arms is in the mutual interests of our country and the Soviet Union.” Negotiated in the midst of severe tensions, the SALT agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty were the first restrictions on the...

Iran's Latest Step Is a Step in the Wrong Direction

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For Immediate Release: November 5, 2019

Media Contacts: Daryl Kimball, executive director, 202-463-8270 ext 107

(Washington, DC)—Today, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani announced that the government would begin injecting uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas into the centrifuge arrays at its underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility. This action, which serves no legitimate civilian purpose and is the fourth and latest breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is a step in the wrong direction.

Iran’s leaders may be trying to leverage greater European action for the sanctions relief it was promised through the JCPOA, but this latest breach of the JCPOA limits is a serious mistake and that will further complicate tensions over Iran’s nuclear activities.

We strongly urge Iran to refrain from accumulating low-enriched uranium from the centrifuges at Fordow. If Iran starts accumulating LEU from the process, it will increase proliferation risk over time. However, because the site is under IAEA surveillance, we will know quickly if Tehran takes any steps toward the production of bomb-grade material.

These developments have, of course, been triggered by President Donald Trump's decision last year to withdraw from the JCPOA and to reimpose sanctions against Iran, which is a clear violation of the commitments made by the United States in 2015. Trump’s Iran policy is by all measures failing. The United States' relationship with Iran far less stable and the security situation in the region is far more dangerous than it was at the end of 2016.

Both sides - Iran and the United States - should return to full compliance with the JCPOA or the crisis will worsen significantly in 2020. The best off-ramp for both sides is the plan floated by French President Emmanuel Macron for U.S. sanctions waivers to allow substantial purchases of Iranian oil in exchange by Europe in exchange for Iran returning to full compliance with the JCPOA, to be followed by the initiation of direct talks on issues of mutual concern.

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Iran may be trying to leverage greater European action for the sanctions relief, but its latest actions will further complicate tensions

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A New Nuclear Deal Begins With New START


November 2019
By Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director

Since 2017, the Trump administration has sought to expand the role and capability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal while withdrawing the United States from key agreements designed to reduce nuclear dangers.

At the same time, President Donald Trump claims he wants to negotiate a nuclear arms control deal with Russia and with China, which has never been part of a nuclear arms limitation treaty.

In an interview Oct. 21, Trump said, “I believe that we’re going to get together with Russia and with China, and we’re going to work out our nuclear pact so that we don’t all continue with this craziness. It’s very costly and very dangerous. It’s very, very dangerous. We should all get together and work out something—a cap, have a cap."

Nuclear weapons are certainly very costly and dangerous, and there are no winners in a nuclear arms race. But contrary to what the president may believe, Washington is not actively engaging with Moscow or Beijing on a nuclear disarmament deal and does not appear to have a viable plan for doing so.

Worse yet, Trump’s advisers have spurned Russian offers thus far to talk about extending the only existing treaty that does cap the deadly strategic arsenals of the world’s two largest nuclear actors: the 2010 U.S.-Russian New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is due to expire in February 2021.

In remarks at the United Nations last month, Thomas DiNanno, deputy assistant secretary of state for defense policy, emerging threats, and outreach, asserted that “we need a new era of arms control, one in which Russia and China are at the negotiating table and willing to reduce nuclear risks rather than heighten them.”

“The Cold War approach, with its bilateral treaties that covered limited types of nuclear weapons or only certain ranges of missiles, is no longer sufficient,” he said.

Talks with other nuclear-armed states aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating all types of nuclear weapons are necessary and overdue. But given the Trump administration’s lack of preparation and the complexity of such an endeavor, there is no possibility a new trilateral deal with Russia and China could be concluded before New START expires.

Contrary to DiNanno’s claims, New START, if extended, would provide the only near-term path to limit Russia’s ill-advised plans for new strategic delivery systems, including a new intercontinental ballistic missile, a long-range torpedo, an “unlimited range” nuclear-powered cruise missile, and hypersonic glide vehicles.

If Trump actually wants to avoid an arms race, the first step is to promptly agree with Russia to extend New START by five years.

New START is working. Allowing the treaty to expire without a viable substitute would be foreign policy malpractice. The treaty verifiably limits the number of deployed strategic warheads for each side to 1,550 and caps the number of deployed delivery vehicles at 700, far more than is necessary to deter a nuclear attack.

Military and intelligence officials greatly value New START inspections and its prohibition on interference with national technical means of verification, which provide predictability and transparency and promote a stable nuclear deterrence posture vis-à-vis Russia.

U.S. allies strongly support a New START extension. There is bipartisan support in Congress and among the American public for the treaty’s extension. Extending the treaty would represent a significant policy win for Trump and would restore some of the United States’ lost standing in the world.

An extension of New START would provide a foundation for a more ambitious follow-on agreement with Russia limiting other types of nuclear weapons, including short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons systems, as well as for talks with China to curb future nuclear and missile competition.

China, however, which has an estimated 300 nuclear weapons, has made it clear it is not going to join New START or reduce the size of its nuclear force unless Washington and Moscow pursue far deeper cuts of their nuclear arsenals, numbering some 6,500 weapons each.

A more realistic approach would be for the United States and Russia agree to negotiate a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with limits well below those of New START by one-third or more if China agrees not to increase the size of its stockpile and adopts some transparency measures.

For instance, all three countries might agree to jointly declare their total warhead numbers, including type of warheads and delivery systems. The three countries also could engage in regular talks on strategic stability, including the interrelationship between strategic ballistic missiles and missile defense, limits on hypersonic weapons, and a joint understanding that cyber capabilities should not be used interfere with nuclear command and control.

These types of multilateral efforts will be difficult and will take time. In the meantime, without New START, the risk of unconstrained nuclear arms competition and conflict with Russia would grow and the task of bringing other states in the nuclear disarmament enterprise would become even more challenging. Extending New START is Trump’s best chance for a deal to reduce the nuclear weapons danger.

 

Since 2017, the Trump administration has sought to expand the role and capability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal while withdrawing the United States from key agreements designed to reduce nuclear dangers.

Argentine Selected to Lead IAEA


November 2019
By Greg Webb and Daryl G. Kimball

Veteran Argentine diplomat Rafael Mariano Grossi will serve as the next director-general of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) following his Oct. 29 selection by the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors in Vienna.

The IAEA Board of Governors voted Oct. 29 to select Rafael Mariano Grossi of Argentina to become the agency's next director-general. (Photo: Dean Calma/IAEA)Grossi won 24 votes, a two-thirds majority of voting board members, and will be formally confirmed as director-general by a Dec. 2 special meeting of the agency’s 171 member states. He is expected to take office the next day.

Acting IAEA Director-General Cornel Feruta of Romania, Grossi’s only opponent in the fourth round of the board’s secret voting, received just 10 votes; one nation abstained. Earlier ballots had eliminated Lassina Zerbo of Burkina Faso, the current executive secretary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, and Slovakia’s Marta Ziakova, who heads her nation’s nuclear regulatory agency.

As part of the selection process for the four-year leadership term, the four candidates had previously delivered public remarks describing their vision for the agency, which monitors non-nuclear-armed nations to ensure they conduct only peaceful nuclear activities. The agency also promotes the use of peaceful nuclear and radioactive technologies around the world, such as in medicine and agriculture. The four candidates all promoted this technical cooperation aspect of the agency’s mission, but only Grossi highlighted the need for internal bureaucratic reforms to improve IAEA effectiveness.

Grossi is currently Argentina’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna and previously served as the IAEA assistant director-general for policy under Director-General Yukiya Amano, whose July death prompted October’s selection process. (See ACT, September 2019.)

Grossi had been expected to serve as president of the 2020 review conference for the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which is expected to be a particularly contentious meeting, taking place 50 years after the treaty entered into force. (See ACT, June 2019.)

In anticipation of Grossi’s selection to lead the IAEA, diplomatic sources told Arms Control Today that the Argentine government has discussed a plan for another of its senior diplomats, Deputy Foreign Minister Gustavo Zlauvinen, to preside over the review conference. Among other diplomatic postings, Zlauvinen has served as IAEA representative to the United Nations in New York, where he represented the agency during NPT meetings from 2001 to 2009.

 

Rafael Mariano Grossi will head the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Nuclear Storm Warnings

It’s hurricane season for arms control. In August, the United States withdrew from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that had eliminated 2,692 nuclear-armed missiles and helped end the Cold War. The demise of the INF opens the door to a new intermediate-range missile race in Europe. In the aftermath, we are pushing key states to pursue new restraints on this very destabilizing class of weapons. Reports out this month indicate the Trump Administration may be also poised to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty as soon as the end of October. The treaty has 34 state...

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