Next Steps in Nuclear Arms Control, and More from CRS
Negotiating a treaty to reduce nuclear weapons is so cumbersome and fraught with political minefields that it can actually retard the process of disarmament. “It usually takes far longer to reduce nuclear forces through a bilateral arms control treaty than it takes to adopt unilateral adjustments to nuclear forces,” according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
“If the Obama Administration reduces U.S. nuclear forces in parallel with Russia, but without a formal treaty, the two nations could avoid months or years in negotiation,” the CRS report says. See Next Steps in Nuclear Arms Control with Russia: Issues for Congress, April 10, 2013.
“Recent data… challenge the belief that the [U.S.] manufacturing sector, taken as a whole, will continue to flourish,” says a newly updated CRS report. “One interpretation of these data is that manufacturing is ‘hollowing out’ as companies undertake a larger proportion of their high-value work abroad. These developments raise the question of whether the United States will continue to generate highly skilled, high-wage jobs related to advanced manufacturing.” See “Hollowing Out” in U.S. Manufacturing: Analysis and Issues for Congress, April 15, 2013.
A rich compilation of information about discretionary government spending was presented in Trends in Discretionary Spending, April 15, 2013.
Some other new or newly updated CRS reports that Congress has not made publicly available include the following.
Federal Authority to Regulate the Compounding of Human Drugs, April 12, 2013
Federal Traffic Safety Programs: An Overview, April 1, 2013
The STOCK Act, Insider Trading, and Public Financial Reporting by Federal Officials, April 12, 2013
International Trade and Finance: Key Policy Issues for the 113th Congress, April 15, 2013
Why Certain Trade Agreements Are Approved as Congressional-Executive Agreements Rather Than as Treaties, April 15, 2013
The United Kingdom and U.S.-UK Relations, April 15, 2013
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]