The Nuclear Cities Initiative is an initiative which purports to support the now struggling community and structures of post-USSR nuclear research, aimed at preventing nuclear proliferation.

History

After the fall of the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

in 1991, concerns about the fate of the Soviet "nuclear cities" fell into the hands of

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

. It was in these secret, highly restricted cities that the Soviet Union designed and produced its nuclear weapons. Due to the great importance of these cities, they were generously funded by the Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, the 600,000 residents and workers of these cities were left enormous funding problems over the past decade of political, social, and economic difficulties in Russia. Despite attempts by Moscow to create self-sustainable infrastructure, the attempts ultimately failed. The Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council (RANSAC), now the Partnership for Global Security, responded by launching the Nuclear Cities Initiative. The initiative was brought about after a 1997 report by the RANSAC recommended action to prevent the "nuclear know-how" of the workers in the cities falling into undesirable hands.

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president President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) *President (education), a leader of a college or university *President (government title) President may also refer to: Automobiles * Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ful ...

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and

n leader

Boris Yeltsin Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin ( rus, Борис Николаевич Ельцин, p=bɐˈrʲis nʲɪkɐˈla(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈjelʲtsɨn, a=Ru-Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.ogg; 1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Soviet and Russian politician wh ...

made the deal in September 1998, confirming their approval of the overall concept. In 1999 $15 million were procured from American assistance programs, but a Russian financial crisis and Congress' decision to halve funding to $7.5 million reduced funding to the project. The project at first worked only on a few of the cities; Russia disallowed development elsewhere until success could be proven in a handful of cities first. In 2001, the U.S.

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criticised the progress made so far, and recommended merging NCI and the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention into a single programme to improve efficiency. By the end of the Clinton administration, over $30 million had been secured for the project, but this was heavily cut by the following Bush administration who reduced expenditure to $6.6 million. However, the 2002 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, which merged IPP and NCI, resulted in a substantial increase in funding to $42 million as it brought funding from the Russian Transition Initiatives budget, which was further increased by $15 million after the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...

Russia's ten nuclear cities

References

External links

Nuclear Cities Initiative, Nuclear Threat Initiative, at www.nti.org

Nuclear Cities Initiative, at www.y12.doe.gov
{{Portal, Atomic, Soviet Union, Russia, United States, Politics Nuclear proliferation Cold War Arms control Defense Threat Reduction Agency Military disbanding and disarmament Nuclear history of Russia Soviet Union–United States relations Russia–United States relations Nuclear weapons programme of Russia