Some Chinese policymakers question whether Japanese under-reporting of plutonium stocks was an honest mistake—or a deliberate effort at concealment

The harnessing of the atom to develop a nuclear bomb 70 years ago unleashed a magnitude of terrifying destruction the world had never witnessed before. The same atomic power also resulted in an "atoms for peace" program, which gave the world nuclear power as a clean source of energy and benefited humanity in the development of nuclear medicine, agriculture, and sciences.

The mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is to facilitate peaceful uses of the atom while ensuring that its nuclear assistance is not used for military purposes -- a challenging mandate that in its implementation introduces both significant benefits and risks to humankind. On one hand the agency helps member states gain access to peaceful nuclear technology; on the other, preventing nuclear proliferation remains one of its crucial activities.

In Part 1 of this article, the recent and historical budgets for securing vulnerable nuclear materials around the globe were analyzed. Recommendations were also made for increasing the budgets for the key National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) programs, including the International Nuclear Material Protection Cooperation (INMPC) and Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) programs, in fiscal year (FY) 2010 and then through 2014.

November 4 marks the centenary of the birth of Nobel laureate Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to walk away from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds and a man who held determined views on the kind of world we should try to create. He was an ardent advocate for dialogue across political divides, the elimination of nuclear weapons, the need ultimately for a world without war, and the social responsibility of scientists.

Why have major US media outlets ignored a UN vote to negotiate a treaty that would ban nuclear weapons?

Although it has been only two years since the conclusion of the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit, it feels as though nuclear politics have been on fast-forward. China, Russia, and the United States are modernizing their nuclear arsenals; North Korea has openly tested intercontinental ballistic missiles; and the pressure for disarmament has found a … Continued

Iran’s cooperation with the Czech Republic on civilian nuclear energy is a good sign for the rest of the world.

Like Marie Skłodowska Curie before her, Justice Ginsburg inspires many more than just those who would join her own profession.

We asked a group of young American and Russians professionals to do a deeper dive on the issue of nuclear safety after last summer’s airing of the popular HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The miniseries took a lot of liberties with the technical facts, but it captured the personal hardships and suffering of the nuclear disaster. We expanded the problem to include the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States and Fukushima in Japan, so as to cover the effects of the world’s three major nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.

In October of 1996, Vladimir Nechai committed suicide. His death was newsworthy, but not because of the means; suicide was not so unusual in Russia, largely due to the widespread financial deprivation in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nechai's act was reported by the Western news media because of his position as director of one of the Soviet Union's premier nuclear weapons research and design facilities. According to the note he left behind, Nechai took his own life partially out of shame.

Alex Wellerstein, author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, talks with Bulletin associate editor Susan D’Agostino about nuclear espionage, security theater, and even an occasion in the 1950s when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists kept a nuclear secret.

In a September 1967 speech, V.C. Trivedi, the Indian Ambassador to an early UN arms control effort known as the Eighteen Nations Committee on Disarmament, said that developing countries could tolerate nuclear weapons apartheid, but not an atomic apartheid that prevented them from attaining the economic progress that civilian nuclear power can bring. Regrettably, today's global nonproliferation architecture is being applied with such selectivity that it can truly be called the neo-nuclear apartheid.

The idea may raise alarm bells at first, but the implications of Seoul-Tehran nuclear cooperation merit further study.

An excerpt from the preface to "Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program," a book written by Siegfried S. Hecker with Elliot A. Serbin (Stanford University Press, January 2023).

On May 13, President George W. Bush submitted to Congress an agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation with the Russian Federation. The "123 agreement"--named after a provision of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act--would establish a 30-year framework for nuclear commerce between the former Cold War enemies, allowing the transfer of nuclear commodities such as reactor components and U.S. government-owned technologies and materials to Russia.

On May 13, President George W. Bush submitted to Congress an agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation with the Russian Federation. The "123 agreement"--named after a provision of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act--would establish a 30-year framework for nuclear commerce between the former Cold War enemies, allowing the transfer of nuclear commodities such as reactor components and U.S. government-owned technologies and materials to Russia.