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“For half a century, ACA has been providing the world … with advocacy, analysis, and awareness on some of the most critical topics of international peace and security, including on how to achieve our common, shared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.”

– Izumi Nakamitsu
UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs
June 2, 2022
  • Time to Rethink and Reduce Nuclear Weapons Spending
    December 2, 2011

    Volume 2, Issue 16, December 2, 2011

    The supercommittee’s Nov. 21 failure to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan has triggered deep, automatic reductions in future U.S. defense spending. At the same time, some in Congress are finally beginning to examine how much the United States plans to spend on nuclear weapons in the years ahead.

  • Pentagon to Revise Nuclear Guidance
    June 2, 2011

    The Pentagon will provide options to President Barack Obama for future nuclear reductions below New START levels and for policy changes in areas such as targeting, prompt-launch alert posture, and retention of the nuclear “triad.”

  • Pursuing the Prague Agenda: An Interview With White House Coordinator Gary Samore
    May 3, 2011

    The White House’s top arms control and nonproliferation official discusses the prospects for future U.S.-Russian agreements on nuclear weapons and missile defense, the administration’s strategy for addressing Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs, the nuclear buildup in Asia, and more.

     

  • The Urgent Need for a Seoul Declaration: A Road Map for the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit and Beyond
    April 3, 2011
  • Universal Transparency: A Goal for the U.S. at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit
    January 10, 2011
  • NATO Struggles to Define New Nuclear Doctrine
    September 3, 2010

    NATO is likely to defer major decisions on its future nuclear weapons policy until after the alliance’s Nov. 19-20 Lisbon summit, according to answers given by the German government to the Bundestag July 20. Diplomatic sources from several countries made similar comments during interviews in recent weeks.

  • Reassessing the Role of U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Turkey
    June 4, 2010

    NATO is revising its Strategic Concept; the alliance is due to complete work on the document in November. A key issue in the revision is the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe as part of the alliance’s policy of extended nuclear deterrence. Although Turkey has long been in agreement with its allies on the value of these forward deployments, it may soon find itself in a delicate position on the question of how to continue the policy effectively.

    With other NATO countries such as Luxembourg and Norway supporting them, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands have indicated a desire to reassess the case for continued deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons on their territories. Should these countries advocate withdrawal of U.S. weapons from Europe, Turkish decision-makers might conclude that two fundamental principles of the alliance, namely solidarity and burden sharing, have been seriously weakened. Those principles have been the basis for Turkey’s agreement, since the early 1960s, to the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons on its soil.

  • Obama’s NPR: Transitional, Not Transformational
    May 5, 2010

    On April 5, 2009, in Prague, President Barack Obama embraced the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. In pursuit of that objective, he called for “an end to Cold War thinking” and pledged to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in [U.S.] national security strategy.”[1] One year later, his administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which fleshes out policies to meet those aspirations.

    The new NPR narrows the circumstances under which the United States might use nuclear weapons and formally establishes some commonsense constraints on U.S. nuclear warhead modernization. It does so in ways that should help reduce the salience of nuclear weapons, help curb proliferation, and open the way for further nuclear arms cuts.

  • A New Nuclear Posture
    May 5, 2010

    A year after President Barack Obama set very high expectations with an April 2009 speech in Prague outlining his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, his administration has released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which goes some distance toward meeting Obama’s stated goal of reducing U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons.

    Perhaps more importantly, the NPR, made public in its entirety, places U.S. nuclear policy within a conceptual framework based on two important ideas. First, the United States has a compelling interest in preventing any use of nuclear weapons. Second, preventing the use of nuclear weapons requires cooperation as much as, if not more than, it requires deterrence. This is a profound change.

     

  • U.S. Nuclear Review Shifts Threat Focus
    May 5, 2010

    Flagging nuclear terrorism and proliferation as the top U.S. national security priorities for the first time, the White House released its long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) April 6. The congressionally mandated report provides a comprehensive description of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and strategy for the next five to 10 years. The 2010 NPR is the third post-Cold War review—the others were in 1994 and 2001—and is the first to be published in an unclassified form.

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