White House Seeks to Ratify Nuclear Protection Policy
To submit an international arms control agreement to the U.S. Senate for ratification has not always been the Bush Administration’s first instinct. But last month the White House asked the Senate to ratify a 2005 Amendment to the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.
“This Amendment is important in the campaign against international nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation,” President Bush wrote in his transmittal letter.
“It will require each State Party to the Amendment to establish, implement, and maintain an appropriate physical protection regime applicable to nuclear material and nuclear facilities used for peaceful purposes.”
The pending Amendment along with a State Department overview and related materials were recently printed for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. See “Amendment to Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Material” (pdf), submitted by the President of the United States to the U.S. Senate, September 4, 2007.
International progress on ratifying the Amendment “remains slow,” lamented Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in a September 10 statement. Of the 128 States that are party to the 1980 Convention, only 11 have approved the 2005 Amendment, he said.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.