Bulletin Rolls Back the Clock to 6 Minutes to Midnight

We are happy to serve you a daily summary of the day's top nuclear policy stories each morning, with excerpts from the stories in bullet form.  

Stories we're following today:

 It Is 6 Minutes to Midnight - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [link]

• We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material.
• This hopeful state of world affairs leads the boards of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back from five to six minutes to midnight.
• By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization.
• For the first time in decades we have an opportunity to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and to slow drastic changes to our shared global environment. 

U.S. Says Russia Arms Deal Close, Talks Resuming - Reuters [link]

• Russia and the United States are "really close" to agreement on a landmark treaty to cut their nuclear arsenals, Ellen Tauscher, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security said on Wednesday.
• Formal negotiations will resume in Geneva on January 25, Tauscher told reporters. "I think we are really close," she said, although she would not predict when the treaty might be signed. "We are in a place where we are working very, very hard."
• The United States now wants the treaty signed by May to set an example for a conference it hopes will bolster the global Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

Obama's Big Nuclear Test - Daryl Kimball in Arms Control Today [link]

• Within the next few months, the administration must finish and win Senate approval of the new START, secure international support for measures to strengthen the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at the May review conference, and begin to persuade undecided Senate Republicans that the time has finally come to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
• To succeed, the president and his cabinet must devote far more energy to these goals and ensure that his administration’s top-to-bottom Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), due by March 1, fully supports his Prague agenda.
• Obama’s NPR is a crucial test of his commitment to reducing nuclear dangers. If it fails to significantly reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy, the global effort to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons and prevent their use will falter.

U.S. Uses CT Scans to Check Out Nuclear Stockpile - Reuters [link]

• The same type of scanner used to peer into the body to detect cancers will be put to an even more delicate use -- checking on the viability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile, the National Nuclear Security Administration said on Wednesday.
• The first user of the CoLOSIS will be Los Alamos National Laboratory, which will test the Air Force's B61 gravity bomb, checking components for signs of aging or manufacturing defects.
• "We can better ensure the reliability of all of the components we put into a weapon," said Geoffrey Beausoleil, deputy site manager at the NNSA's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
• "If we are not going to build and test new weapons -- or any old weapons for that matter -- we need to assure our customer, the Department of Defense, that the product we give them is reliable," he said.

A View from the Dark Side

Barack Obama's America-effacing Policy: A Warning from John Bolton - Power Line [link]

• John Bolton delivered the keynote address today in New York at the first annual Reclaim America Conference. The conference was presented by the Hudson Institute in partnership with the Family Security Foundation and Human Events.
• With respect to North Korea and Iran, we have deferred to the "global community" and now rely on a policy of begging these countries to negotiate with us.
• Ultimately, says Bolton, Iran and North Korea are understandably confident that they can "roll" Obama. In the meantime, the rest of the world sees a weak U.S. And when we ultimately fail to stop either nation, the floodgates of nuclear proliferation will open.
• Bolton argues, as we have almost since we started blogging, that the only way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear facilities.