Write him a briefing memo to explain why he should (or should not) vote for the appropriations for Cooperative Threat Reduction programs.

Question

You are once again the staffer to a new Senator. This time the year is 1993 and the Senator is asking you why he should vote to send billions of dollars to Russia to secure its nuclear materials and destroy its chemical and biological warfare facilities. “We have to pay for our own drawdown. Why should we pay for theirs too?”

Write him a briefing memo to explain why he should (or should not) vote for the appropriations for Cooperative Threat Reduction programs.

Readings

William C. Potter, “The Politics of Nuclear Renunciation: The Cases of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine,” Occasional Paper, Henry L. Stimson Center. (PDF)

https://www.stimson.org/sites/default/files/file-attachments/Occasional%20Paper%20No.%2022%20April%201995.pdf
Frank V. Pabian, “South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Lessons for U.S. Nonproliferation Policy,”

Nonproliferation Review, Fall 1995 (PDF).
Waldo Stumpf, “The Birth and Death of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program,”

http://fas.org/nuke/guide/rsa/nuke/stumpf.htm
International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Presentation of Global Fissile Materials Report 2015.” (PDF)

http://fissilematerials.org/library/ipfm15.pdf
Mary Beth D. Nikitin and Amy F. Woolf, “The Evolution of Cooperative Threat Reduction: Issues for Congress,”

Congressional Research Service, June 2014 (PDF)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R43143.pdf

Biological Weapons in the Former Soviet Union: An Interview with Dr. Kenneth Alibeck,” Non-proliferation Review, Spring/Summer 1999 (PDF)

Dr. Stephen Burgess, Dr. Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, USAF Counter proliferation Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 2001. (PDF)
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2001/southafrica.pdf

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