Key Steps for Reducing Nuclear Threats

The steps for reducing nuclear dangers globally require action and leadership across a number of fronts, from reducing nuclear forces to securing nuclear materials. The United States and Russia, which possess nearly 95% of the world’s nuclear warheads, must take the lead on efforts to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

At the same time, all countries should commit to a set of urgent and practical steps:

• Work with leaders of countries with nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise.  
• Discard Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons for U.S. and Russian forces to reduce the danger of accidental, mistaken or unauthorized launch.
• Substantially reduce nuclear forces in all countries that possess them.
• Eliminate short-range battlefield nuclear weapons designed to be forward deployed.
• Adopt a process to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into effect.
• Secure all nuclear weapons and materials globally to the highest possible standards.
• Develop a new international system to manage the risks associated with producing fuel for nuclear power.
• Halt the production globally of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons purposes; phase out the use of HEU in civil commerce and remove weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and render it safe.
• Redouble efforts to resolve regional conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.
• Strengthen verification and enforcement capabilities.

You can support these steps by sharing the Cuban Missile Crisis website on Facebook or Twitter; organizing friends to watch the movie Nuclear Tipping Point; signing up to get updates from NTI; or supporting NTI through a donation.

In 2007 former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn published a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and these urgent steps that can be taken immediately to reduce nuclear dangers.

They joined together to form the Nuclear Security Project—a major effort to galvanize global action to reduce urgent nuclear dangers and build support for reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.