Department of Energy employees and contractors are no longer allowed to use the popular short-video app TikTok “or any successor application or service” from the Chinese-owned company ByteDance on government devices.
The prohibition is law, as of the passing of the creatively-named “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” which “prohibits the presence or use of a covered application on information technology, including certain equipment used by Federal contractors,” DOE said in a memo circulated this week.
The prohibition applies to government-owned devices and those of DOE contractors and employee-owned devices used as part of an employer bring-your-own-device program. “A personally-owned cell phone that is not used in the performance of the contract is not subject to the prohibition,” DOE said in a memo on the new rule.
Federal law requires the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to manage cybersecurity risks, but its efforts to identify, assess, and mitigate cyber risks are still in the early stages of development, the Government Accountability Office found in a recent audit.
NNSA and its contractors remain in the early stages of efforts, “even after several years,” to address cybersecurity at the system level in its operational technology and nuclear weapons IT environments, the GAO said in a report published June 12.
“NNSA is still trying to inventory systems with potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” the report said. “NNSA’s efforts to identify, assess, and mitigate cyber risks—to specific weapons or manufacturing equipment—are still in the early stages of development. For instance, NNSA is still trying to inventory systems with potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”
Nine countries spent $82.9 billion on nuclear weapons, of which the private sector earned at least $29 billion in 2022, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) says in its most recent annual report. The United States spent $43.7 billion on its nuclear weapons, more than all of the other nuclear-armed states combined, ICAN said. Russia spent $9.6 billion on its nuclear forces in 2022, just 22% of what the U.S. did. China spent $11.7 billion, just over a quarter of the U.S. total.
The report is ICAN’s fourth annual report documenting investments in global nuclear weapons spending. The 46-page report also tallies lobbying money spent by major nuclear defense contractors and how much revenue defense-focused think tanks raked in from those companies.
A National Academies-backed study is updating research on the effects of nuclear war on the environment and will hold hybrid information gathering meetings next week, June 22-23.
“Studies of the potential climate effects of nuclear war in the 1980s focused on northern hemisphere, large-scale nuclear conflicts, and predicted more extreme global ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios,” the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board and the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate announced Friday. The “Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War” will explore scenarios ranging from “small-scale regional nuclear exchanges to large-scale exchanges between major powers.”
The first unclassified meeting will occur next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Details, including registration information, can be found here.
Space Systems Command’s United States Nuclear Detonation Detection System (NDS) has successfully concluded the system requirements review of the NDS Analysis Package Ground Station and Sandia Data Analysis and Display System, both components of the next-generation nuclear detection ground system, scheduled for fielding in 2028. Both reviews were performed in May at Sandia National Laboratories at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
The initial test, conducted at Sandia in February, involved the integrated correlation and display system ground systems requirements and represented the culmination of a more than eight-month collaboration between Sandia and Space Systems Command’s Strategic Missile Warning Acquisition Delta, the U.S. Space Force said in a statement. Sandia serves as the next-generation NDS lead contractor, with augmented support from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The U.S. State Department has “designated” two Beijing-based North Korean nationals connected to Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction procurement with trying to obtain North Korean nuclear missile components.
North Korea’s development of nuclear missile programs “directly threatens regional and international security, and the United States will continue to take action to curtail activities in support of those programs,” the State Department said in a June 15 statement.
The husband-and-wife pair, Choe Chol Min and his wife Choe Un Jung, have worked with North Korean weapons trading officials, Chinese nationals, and others to procure materials used in the production of North Korean missiles, the State Department says. Choe Shol Min has also helped more than a thousand North Korean workers illegally emigrate to China to “unlawfully generate income abroad for the DPRK regime,” the State department says. Choe Un Jung is officially assigned to the North Korean embassy in China and “helped coordinate an order with one or more … associates for dual-use bearings used in DPRK missile production,” the State Department says.
