Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
7/11/2014
Obama Administration officials emphasized the importance of innovations and new technologies in stockpile stewardship and nonproliferation at a State Department conference held in Washington this week. National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz stressed that the national laboratories play a key role in developing those technologies, speaking at the fifth annual Generation Prague conference at the State Department’s headquarters. “The continued importance of scientific research and innovation to the maintenance of a safe and secure nuclear stockpile, and therefore nuclear deterrence, has not been fully understood or fully appreciated, especially as budgets are being debated and decided in this town,” he said. “The bottom line is you cannot do stewardship without leading-edge science, and you can’t advance science without investing in basic research.”
This week’s conference was an annual youth-oriented discussion on international security that grew out of President Obama’s 2009 speech in Prague, where he set a long-term goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. Klotz said that the national labs also play a key role in nonproliferation. “This intellectual capital also provides the means to solve many of the technical challenges of verifying treaty compliance, assessing foreign nuclear weapons capabilities and activities, securing nuclear radiological material and combatting nuclear terrorism,” he said. “In fact, the NNSA and the Department of Energy are conducting extensive research and developments to support national and international nonproliferation efforts, nuclear arms control verification and nuclear security. These programs develop innovative solutions to difficult technical problems such as nuclear detonation detection, verification and monitoring and the development of various safeguard technologies.”
Innovations will also be necessary for future nuclear arms reduction treaties, State Department Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller said at the conference. “Our tasks in the arms control field are going to be a lot more difficult to tackle and it is there that the new technologies that are now available to us can really make a difference to us,” she said. “In future nuclear arms reduction treaties we’ll be looking at smaller units of account such as warheads. We will be looking at items that will be held in storage facilities away from the eyes of overhead satellites that we depend on a great deal today. We will perhaps be looking at warheads that are not mated to their delivery vehicles, but instead are in storage facilities. We have to have really sophisticated abilities to monitor and verify those future treaties and agreements.”
