Officials from the United States and Singapore signed a 30-year peaceful civil nuclear technology deal, or 1-2-3 agreement, on Wednesday as part of the U.S. secretary of state’s six-country Asia tour.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan were present for the signing. Officials from both countries, in a joint statement, said that “over the past decade, the United States has supported Singapore’s efforts to better understand the safety and reliability of advanced nuclear energy technologies and build capacity.”
According to a Chinese news site, the U.S. has signed 1-2-3 agreements with 48 countries as of this week, with Singapore joining Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam as the members from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations involved in the agreement.
The National Nuclear Security Administration will conduct low-altitude helicopter flights August 13-15 over downtown Chicago, Ill., to detect radiation threats during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the agency said in a press release.
The Nuclear Energy Support Team’s (NEST) aircraft, a twin-engine Bell-412 with radiation sensing technology, will scan for background radiation by flying in a grid pattern 150 feet in the air during day time hours for around two hours.
The NNSA’s aerial measuring system aims to frequently support preventative radiation missions in preparation for high-profile events, including the Superbowl, political party conventions, and the presidential inauguration. NNSA also conducted these flights during the Republican National Convention in July.
The declassified numbers of the military stockpile of U.S. nuclear warheads “underscore a continuing arms race,” according to social justice magazine The Progressive.
The National Nuclear Security Administration released a report July 20 revealing 3,748 warheads ready to use in the stockpile, slightly more warheads than were in the last declassification in 2021.
“The revelation comes amid a new arms race that the United States is helping to fuel with a $1.7 trillion investment in so-called modernization, replacing missiles, airplanes, and submarines, while upgrading 3,750 existing warheads and creating new ones for the first time in three decades,” Jim Carrier, author of the article, said.
The Air Force Global Strike Command awarded software company Stottler Henke a contract to develop artificial intelligence software to manage maintaining the intercontinental ballistic missiles and infrastructure this week.
Stottler Henke would develop a scheduling solution based on Aurora software, a planning and scheduling AI software originally developed by NASA, to optimize scheduling maintenance activities for the ICBMs. Scheduling and maintaining assets, according to the press release, is “critical to plan and execute” efficiently, but it is “difficult to produce efficient schedules” because of the complexities of the activities involved with ICBMs.
“Aurora capability has reduced combining and validating three schedules from a four to five hour data entry process to just minutes,” John Mora, branch chief, munitions and mission maintenance with 20th Air Force said in the release.