The United States will continue to work with Russia on nonproliferation, arms control, and countering nuclear terrorism outside of the Nuclear Security Summit process, two senior State Department officials said Monday. Bonnie Jenkins, coordinator for the State Department’s threat reduction programs, said during a conference call with reporters that despite the reduction in U.S.-Russian nonproliferation activities and the Kremlin’s decision not to participate in the summit being held in Washington, D.C., later this week, some joint activities continue. Jenkins noted as an example the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, an international partnership co-chaired by the U.S. and Russia that conducts multilateral activities on nuclear security and detection. Through this type of forum, “we believe that in the future . . . we will continue to work with Russia,” Jenkins said.
The upcoming summit is the Obama administration’s last in its current format. However, “we cannot say that this is the last summit,” Jenkins said, noting that the next administration could choose to hold similar events. Russia withdrew from this year’s summit due to political disagreements on the action plans being developed to guide the work of international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency. These guidelines would serve to “impose the opinion of a limited group of states” on global bodies “in circumvention of their own political decision-making mechanisms,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this year. “We consider the creation of a precedent for outside interference in the planning of the work of international organizations . . . to be unacceptable.”
Thomas Countryman, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, said during the press conference that “Russia, which possesses a large amount of the material we’re concerned about – highly enriched uranium and plutonium – has steadily and greatly improved its controls, its internal security, both before and since the first [nuclear security] summit. And this is a concrete result of our cooperation.”
