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 National Security Agency has issued new guidance to assist officials in redacting (censoring) documents in Microsoft Word format and producing unclassified Adobe Portable Document (PDF) files without inadvertently…
Read moreWhen he signed the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act, which included a prohibition against torture of detainees in U.S. custody, President Bush issued a signing statement implying that he could disregard…
Read moreThe Department of Justice renewed its legal defense of warrantless domestic intelligence surveillance by the National Security Agency in a 42 page white paper transmitted to Congress yesterday. The white…
Read moreThe Royal Canadian Military Institute (RCMI) has published an article by FAS’s director of the Nuclear Information Project about how U.S. nuclear planners are preparing for the failure…
Read moreSixteen members of Congress have asked President George W. Bush to intervene in the Pentagon’s revision of Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. In a joint letter published by…
Read moreOn November 18, 2005, U.S. Strategic Command's new Space a Global Strike command achieved Initial Operational Capability (IOC) at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. The new command, is tasked with implementing the new Global Strike mission assigned to STRATCOM in 2003. This includes CONPLAN 8022, a new strike plan that includes preemptive nuclear strike against weapons of mass destruction facilities anywhere in
Read moreDuring an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel on October 31, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested that it is European governments, not the United States, that are responsible for the lingering deployment of U.S. nuclear bombs in Europe. Rather than defending the mission of the weapons, Rumsfeld said: "Some European countries in Europe made the decision to allow them
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