By Hans M. Kristensen The first public release of New START aggregate numbers since the United States and Russia in February extended the agreement for five years shows the treaty continues to limit the two nuclear powers strategic offensive nuclear forces. Continued adherence to the New START limits is one…
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For the past three years, the Trump Administration refused to provide an annual tally of the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile or the number of weapons that had been dismantled each year, though that had been the practice under the Obama Administration and through 2017. The Federation…
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By Hans M. Kristensen The United Kingdom announced yesterday that it has decided to abandon a previous plan to reduce it nuclear weapons stockpile to 180 by the mid-2020s and instead “move to an overall nuclear weapon stockpile of no more than 260 warheads.” The decision makes Britain the first…
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Shortly before the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued a directive that altered the process for preparing the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF, stripping out limitations on signals intelligence collection from the previous policy. The NIPF is perhaps the single most important administrative…
Read moreThe intelligence reform legislation of 2004 abolished the position of Director of Central Intelligence, transferring many of its functions to the new Director of National Intelligence. This raised a technical…
Read moreIn the past, the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that develops spy satellites, has released unclassified portions of its budget request documents. But last year, the NRO refused to…
Read moreThe Department of Energy has released a sanitized version of its nineteenth report to Congress on inadvertent releases of classified nuclear weapons information through the declassification process. Out of…
Read moreSome notable rules and regulations on security policy that have recently been published include the following: “National Industrial Security Program Directive Number 1,” Information Security Oversight Office, January 27,…
Read moreFAS hopes the President will take the opportunity to send the right message to the American public and ditch political rhetoric in his State of the Union. FAS is deeply concerned that the nation is headed in the wrong direction on critical science issues that affect our health, national security, environment and economic future. The President has an opportunity to change that starting with his State of the Union address on January 31st. Specifically, we would like the President to take scientific research funding, science education funding, and biosecurity more seriously then he has in the past.
Read moreA couple of articles in the energy trade press [link] have said that President Bush may announce a major new energy initiative in the State of the Union Address. This is a program that has been in planning for over a year. Originally it was called the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative, or GNEI, pronounced "genie," but apparently the Administration decided that acronym was a bit too cute, with too many "getting out of the bottle" snipes. More recent articles in the Washington Post [link] and Wall Street Journal report that the program has been renamed the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and is not quite ready for prime time so will probably not appear in the Address but will be unveiled in a couple of months. [link] If it does get a mention, I will return to this on Wednesday. By all accounts, the centerpiece of GNEP will be plutonium reprocessing and recycling. This is one of those ideas that is great in theory but doesn't work in practice. The plan is to reduce nuclear waste by repeatedly recycling it through a new (in the US at least) type of power reactor, a fast neutron reactor. [more]
Read moreHello, I’m Anne Fitzpatrick. I work on international collaborations in computing, American and Russian nuclear weapons, and science and technology policy and culture. I also moonlight in the area of…
Read moreI am Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at FAS. I will be blogging facts, analysis, and declassified documents about new nuclear weapon systems, changes…
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