US-RUSSIAN LABORATORY-TO-LABORATORY COOPERATION IN NUCLEAR MATERIALS PROTECTION, CONTROL, AND ACCOUNTING

Under the guidance of the Department of Energy (DOE), six DOE laboratories have initiated a new program of cooperation with the Russian Federation's nuclear institutes. The purpose of the program is to accelerate progress toward a common goal shared by both the US and Russia— to reduce the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation, including such threats as theft, diversion, and unauthorized possession of nuclear materials, by strengthening systems of nuclear materials protection, control, and accounting. This new program is called the Laboratory-to-Laboratory Nuclear Materials Protection, Control, and Accounting (Lab-to-Lab MPC&A) Program. It is designed to complement other US-Russian MPC&A programs such as the government-to-government (Nunn-Lugar) programs. The Lab-to-Lab MPC&A program began in 1994 with pilot projects at two sites: Arzamas-16 and the Kurchatov Institute. The program has now expanded to include additional Russian institutes and facilities, such as the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk, Chelyabinsk-70, Eleron, the Institute of Automatics, the Institute of Inorganic Materials, the Siberian Chemical Complex (Tomsk-7), and several nuclear weapons dismantlement plants. This paper presents an overview of the Laboratory-to-Laboratory MPC&A Program. It describes the background and need for the program; the objectives and strategy; the participating US and Russian laboratories, institutes and enterprises; highlights of the technical work; and plans for the next several years.