Concern about the threat posed by nuclear weapons has preoccupied the United States and presidents of the United States since the beginning of the nuclear era. Nuclear Security draws from papers presented at the 2013 meeting of the American Nuclear Society examining worldwide efforts to control nuclear weapons and ensure the safety of the nuclear enterprise of weapons and reactors against catastrophic accidents. The distinguished contributors, all known for their long-standing interest in getting better control of the threats posed by nuclear weapons and reactors, discuss what we can learn from past successes and failures and attempt to identify the key ingredients for a road ahead that can lead us toward a world free of nuclear weapons. The authors review historical efforts to deal with the challenge of nuclear weapons, with a focus on the momentous arms control negotiations between U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. They offer specific recommendations for reducing risks that should be adopted by the nuclear enterprise, both military and civilian, in the United States and abroad. Since the risks posed by the nuclear enterprise are so high, they conclude, no reasonable effort should be spared to ensure safety and security.

This book describes the four Nuclear Security Summits held over 2010-2016 at the initiative of U.S. President Barack Obama. The author draws upon his unique vantage point as a participant in the Summits, exclusive interviews with practitioners, and access to primary documents, to write an engaging history of the NSS and of nuclear security in general. The story of the NSS is also in part the story of multilateral nuclear forums, which have sprung up regularly since the dawn of the nuclear age to address perceived nuclear dangers. The success of these Summits in addressing the threat of nuclear terrorism holds important lessons for the design and work of nuclear forums today and into the future. The author presents a new approach to assessing ‘international learning’ that has important implications for the design of multilateral forums and updates the Cold War areas of nuclear knowledge being ‘learnt’ in the light of the NSS experience and other recent developments. This work will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in security studies, nuclear history, and International Relations.

This open access book examines key aspects of international cooperation to enhance nuclear safety, security, safeguards, and nonproliferation, thereby assisting in development and maintenance of the verification regime and fostering progress toward a nuclear weapon-free world. Current challenges are discussed and attempts made to identify possible solutions and future improvements, considering scientific developments that have the potential to increase the effectiveness of implementation of international regimes, particularly in critical areas, technology foresight, and the ongoing evaluation of current capabilities.

The Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material was signed at Vienna and at New York on 3 March 1980. The Convention is the only international legally binding undertaking in the area of physical protection of nuclear material. It establishes measures related to the prevention, detection and punishment of offenses relating to nuclear material. A Diplomatic Conference in July 2005 was convened to amend the Convention and strengthen its provisions. The amended Convention makes it legally binding for States Parties to protect nuclear facilities and material in peaceful domestic use, storage as well as transport. It also provides for expanded cooperation between and among States regarding rapid measures to locate and recover stolen or smuggled nuclear material, mitigate any radiological consequences of sabotage, and prevent and combat related offences. The amendments will take effect once they have been ratified by two-thirds of the States Parties of the Convention.

Countering Cyber Sabotage: Introducing Consequence-Driven, Cyber-Informed Engineering (CCE) introduces a new methodology to help critical infrastructure owners, operators and their security practitioners make demonstrable improvements in securing their most important functions and processes. Current best practice approaches to cyber defense struggle to stop targeted attackers from creating potentially catastrophic results. From a national security perspective, it is not just the damage to the military, the economy, or essential critical infrastructure companies that is a concern. It is the cumulative, downstream effects from potential regional blackouts, military mission kills, transportation stoppages, water delivery or treatment issues, and so on. CCE is a validation that engineering first principles can be applied to the most important cybersecurity challenges and in so doing, protect organizations in ways current approaches do not. The most pressing threat is cyber-enabled sabotage, and CCE begins with the assumption that well-resourced, adaptive adversaries are already in and have been for some time, undetected and perhaps undetectable. Chapter 1 recaps the current and near-future states of digital technologies in critical infrastructure and the implications of our near-total dependence on them. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the origins of the methodology and set the stage for the more in-depth examination that follows. Chapter 4 describes how to prepare for an engagement, and chapters 5-8 address each of the four phases. The CCE phase chapters take the reader on a more granular walkthrough of the methodology with examples from the field, phase objectives, and the steps to take in each phase. Concluding chapter 9 covers training options and looks towards a future where these concepts are scaled more broadly.

This book describes the four Nuclear Security Summits held over 2010-2016 at the initiative of U.S. President Barack Obama. The author draws upon his unique vantage point as a participant in the Summits, exclusive interviews with practitioners, and access to primary documents, to write an engaging history of the NSS and of nuclear security in general. The story of the NSS is also in part the story of multilateral nuclear forums, which have sprung up regularly since the dawn of the nuclear age to address perceived nuclear dangers. The success of these Summits in addressing the threat of nuclear terrorism holds important lessons for the design and work of nuclear forums today and into the future. The author presents a new approach to assessing ‘international learning’ that has important implications for the design of multilateral forums and updates the Cold War areas of nuclear knowledge being ‘learnt’ in the light of the NSS experience and other recent developments. This work will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in security studies, nuclear history, and International Relations.

The U.S. government has made safeguarding of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium an international policy priority, and convened The 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 12 and 13, 2010. Forty six governments sent delegations to the summit and twenty nine of them made national commitments to support nuclear security. During the Summit, India announced its commitment to establish a Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership. The Centre is to be open to international participation through academic0 exchanges, training, and research and development efforts. India-United States Cooperation on Global Security is the summary of a workshop held by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) together with its partner of more than 15 years, the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, India. The workshop identified and examined potential areas for substantive scientific and technical cooperation between the two countries on issues related to nuclear material security. Technical experts from India and the United States focused on topics of nuclear material security and promising opportunities for India and the United States to learn from each other and cooperate. This report discusses nuclear materials management issues such as nuclear materials accounting, cyber security, physical security, and nuclear forensics.