The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism convened its biannual plenary meeting last week in Tokyo, Japan, where partner nations committed to continue the work of three nuclear detection, forensics, and response working groups. The U.S. State Department shed more light on the meeting’s proceedings Friday in an announcement.
The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT), co-chaired by the United States and Russia, is intended to promote international cooperation to strengthen global prevention, detection, and response to acts of nuclear terrorism. It gained two new partner nations at the latest meeting — Paraguay and Nigeria — bringing the group to a total of 88 nations and five official observers.
C.S. Eliot Kang, U.S. acting assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, attended the GICNT’s 10th senior-level meeting, which was chaired by Ambassador Kazutoshi Aikawa, a disarmament chief for Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Partner nations discussed their achievements from 2015-2017, the State Department said. These included a meeting of the Nuclear Forensics Working Group, organized by Australia and the United States, at the Savannah River Research Campus in Aiken, South Carolina in 2015; a Nuclear Detection Working Group meeting hosted by Finland in 2016 to discuss implementation of nuclear detection architectures; and another meeting of experts in Italy last year on nuclear forensics capacity-building.
According to the State Department, the partnership determined that its Nuclear Detection Working Group will continue holding exercises on securing nuclear and radioactive material outside of regulatory control and improving partner capacity in investigating illicit trafficking of such material. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Forensics Working Group will continue to hold regional and multilateral exercises in support of national investigations and prosecutions; and the Response and Mitigation Working Group will help partner nations test national emergency management capabilities and conduct radiological source security activities.
The group also discussed the partnership’s activities for 2017-2019; progress will be reviewed at the next plenary meeting in 2019. Argentina has announced it will host the next meeting.
