Doomed to Cooperate: How Lab-to-Lab Nuclear Cooperation Helped to Avert Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers

It is difficult to imagine today how dramatically global nuclear risks changed 25 years ago as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Instead of the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, the world became concerned that Russia and the 14 other former Soviet states would lose control of their huge nuclear assets – tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, more than a million kilograms of fissile materials, hundreds of thousands of nuclear workers, and a huge nuclear complex. I will describe how scientists and engineers at the DOE laboratories, with a focus on Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, joined forces with those at the Russian nuclear weapon institutes for more than 20 years to avoid what looked like the perfect nuclear storm – a story told in the recently released two-volume book Doomed to Cooperate.1