Russia Undermining 20 Years of Nuclear Cooperation With U.S.

The U.S.’s relationship with
Russia is about to get even more tense. The latter nation announced
that it’s going to curtail nuclear cooperation with America,
backtracking on the last two decades of security work.

The New York Times
sheds some light:

The message delivered by [Sergey Kirienko, the head
of Russia’s state nuclear company] is the first time that the
rising tensions between the Kremlin and the Obama administration
have threatened to disrupt some of the practical efforts that the
two sides initiated at the end of the Cold War to help Russia
safeguard its nuclear materials.

“There is a real danger that 20 years of U.S.-Russian
cooperation to secure nuclear material will simply stop at the end
of this year, and some of the gains we have made could slip away,”
said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor who, during the
administration of Bill Clinton, supervised a classified government
study on protecting nuclear materials in Russia.

A senior Obama administration official said the United States
still planned to work with the Russians on nuclear security efforts
in third countries and hoped to persuade the Russian government to
continue cooperation in Russia. …

“Nuclear security in Russia has improved dramatically since the
years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union,”
the Belfer Center at Harvard concluded in a March report.
“Unfortunately, sophisticated conspiracies to steal valuable items
continue to plague Russia.”

Last week Russia announced that it would boycott the 2016
Nuclear Security Summit, which will be hosted by the Obama
administration.

Russian relations with the West have become tense on another
nuclear front. Nuclear-capable bomber drills over Europe without
“active transponders—which would allow civilian air traffic
controllers to see them. The situation could lead to a serious
accident where an airliner might collide with a Russian bomber,”

explains The Daily Beast. Likewise, Russia just
announced that it’s going to conduct long-range bomber patrols over
the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier this year, a Russian propaganda
director
announced that his country could “turn the U.S. into
radioactive ashes” if it wanted.

Both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry
met with their Kremlin counterparts last weekend to try to find
common ground on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Little if any progress
was made. Obama will have another unofficial meeting with Vladimir
Putin this weekend at the Brisbane G20 summit.

Russian troops have been crossing Ukraine’s border in larger
numbers since last week, and Andrei Illarionov, Putin’s former
economic adviser who now works at the Cato Institute, predicts
that Russia will launch a larger-scale invasion within two
weeks.