The Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) is part of the United States Department of State. Its Russian counterpart in Moscow is the National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center in the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The NRRC was created in 1987 by an agreement between the United States Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister. [1] Its purpose was to create an additional channel of communication for the prevention of nuclear war, in addition to the Hot Line and diplomatic channels. [2] The NRRC began operations on April 1, 1988. [3] The NRRC is online 24 hours a day and relays information regarding the arms activities of both nations so as to prevent accidental outbreak of nuclear war.
In 2013, the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center was expanded in scope in order to convey inquiries and messages regarding cybersecurity incidents. [4] [5] On October 31, 2016, the channel was used to convey a message demanding an end to Russian interference with the United States Presidential election. [6] [7]
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis, was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
In nuclear ethics and deterrence theory, no first use (NFU) refers to a type of pledge or policy wherein a nuclear power formally refrains from the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in warfare, except for as a second strike in retaliation to an attack by an enemy power using WMD. Such a pledge would allow for a unique state of affairs in which a given nuclear power can be engaged in a conflict of conventional weaponry while it formally forswears any of the strategic advantages of nuclear weapons, provided the enemy power does not possess or utilize any such weapons of their own. The concept is primarily invoked in reference to nuclear mutually assured destruction but has also been applied to chemical and biological warfare, as is the case of the official WMD policy of India.
World War III, also known as the Third World War, is a hypothetical future global conflict subsequent to World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). It is widely assumed that such a war would involve all of the great powers, like its predecessors, as well as the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, surpassing all prior conflicts in geographic scope, devastation and loss of life.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II.
START I was a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the reduction and the limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994. The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers.
Continuity of government (COG) is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of a catastrophic event such as nuclear war.
The National Security Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located on the campus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1985 to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive is an investigative journalism center, open government advocate, international affairs research institute, and the largest repository of declassified U.S. documents outside the federal government. In the four decades of its history, the National Security Archive has spurred the declassification of more than 15 million pages of government documents by being the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), filing a total of more than 70,000 FOIA and declassification requests.
Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov was a senior Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Russian submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo against ships of the United States Navy at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The course of events that would have followed such an action cannot be known, but speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war.
The Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement was created to reduce the danger of nuclear war between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The agreement was signed at the Washington Summit, on June 22, 1973. The United States and the U.S.S.R. agreed to reduce the threat of a nuclear war and establish a policy to restrain hostility.
The Moscow–Washington hotline is a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and the Russian Federation. This hotline was established in 1963 and links the Pentagon with the Kremlin. Although in popular culture it is known as the "red telephone", the hotline was never a telephone line, and no red phones were used. The first implementation used Teletype equipment, and shifted to fax machines in 1986. Since 2008, the Moscow–Washington hotline has been a secure computer link over which messages are exchanged by a secure form of email.
The United States and Russia maintain one of the most important, critical, and strategic foreign relations in the world. Both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration.
General Thomas Sarsfield Power was a United States Air Force officer who served as commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1957-1964. He was an active military flier for more than 30 years.
The United States of America has conducted espionage against the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation.
Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak is a Russian senior diplomat and politician. Since September 2017, he has represented Mordovia in the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian legislature. Previously he served as the Ambassador of Russia to the United States from 2008 to 2017. From 2003 to 2008, he was the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and from 1998 to 2003, he served as the Ambassador of Russia to Belgium and Russia's Head of Mission to NATO.
Cyberwarfare is the use of computer technology to disrupt the activities of a state or organization, especially the deliberate attacking of information systems for strategic or military purposes. As a major developed economy, the United States is highly dependent on the Internet and therefore greatly exposed to cyber attacks. At the same time, the United States has substantial capabilities in both defense and offensive power projection thanks to comparatively advanced technology and a large military budget. Cyberwarfare presents a growing threat to physical systems and infrastructures that are linked to the internet. Malicious hacking from domestic or foreign enemies remains a constant threat to the United States. In response to these growing threats, the United States has developed significant cyber capabilities.
The National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2013 is a bill that would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to conduct cybersecurity activities on behalf of the federal government and would codify the role of DHS in preventing and responding to cybersecurity incidents involving the Information Technology (IT) systems of federal civilian agencies and critical infrastructure in the United States.
The National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center is part of the Russian Ministry of Defense, and known also as The Directorate for Control of Agreements' Implementation. It has counterpart in Washington D.C. in the United States Department of State. The main task is the organization of work on the implementation of agreements in the field of Arms reduction and implementation of all the international agreements which were signed by the Russian Ministry of Defence.
A nuclear close call is an incident that might have led to at least one unintended nuclear detonation or explosion, but did not. These incidents typically involve a perceived imminent threat to a nuclear-armed country which could lead to retaliatory strikes against the perceived aggressor. The damage caused by international nuclear exchange is not necessarily limited to the participating countries, as the hypothesized rapid climate change associated with even small-scale regional nuclear war could threaten food production worldwide—a scenario known as nuclear famine. There have also been a number of accidents involving nuclear weapons, such as crashes of nuclear armed aircraft.
The Helsinki Summit was a private, bilateral meeting between American President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that took place in Helsinki, Finland on September 9, 1990. Due to the vested interests of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the Gulf Crisis' resolution, August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was the primary topic of discussion for the leaders during the Helsinki Summit. The concerted efforts at easing American-Soviet tensions in the aftermath of the Cold War was another prominent topic, among other notable current events. At the summit's conclusion, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev produced a document of joint statements that illuminated the areas in which the leaders had committed to aligning their foreign policy goals. The summit was followed by a press conference wherein members of the media questioned Presidents Bush and Gorbachev about the content of their meeting and the justifications for their joint statements.
Later dubbed "Hot Line," the Washington-Moscow link was designed to continue to build up trust between the two countries, prevent the use of nuclear weapons as a result of misunderstanding or contradictory information in crisis situations.
Secretary Shultz, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, National Security Advisor Powell, Deputy Secretary of Defense Taft, Senator Nunn, Senator Warner, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, and U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Jack F. Matlock opened the U.S. NRRC on March 22, 1988, and exchanged the first message with the Soviet NRRC. The NRRC began formal operations on April 1, and the first treaty notification was transmitted to the Soviet NRRC five days later. The first notification from the Soviet Union was received on June 2, 1988.
In 2013, the U.S. and Russia agreed to expand the scope of the NRRC link to exchange inquiries regarding cyber security incidents.
To prevent crises, the United States and Russia also recognize the need for secure and reliable lines of communication to make formal inquiries about cybersecurity incidents of national concern. In this spirit, we have decided to use the longstanding Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) links established in 1987 between the United States and the former Soviet Union to build confidence between our two nations through information exchange, employing their around-the-clock staffing at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., and the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. As part of the expanded NRRC role in bilateral and multilateral security and confidence building arrangements, this new use of the system allows us to quickly and reliably make inquiries of one another's competent authorities to reduce the possibility of misperception and escalation from ICT security incidents.
The message was sent on a special channel created in 2013 as part of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, using a template designed for crisis communication. "It was a very clear statement to the Russians and asked them to stop their activity," a senior administration official said, adding: "The fact that we used this channel was part of the messaging."
A second senior administration official reached by phone confirms the U.S. sent Moscow a message back on October 31. It was delivered via the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center through a special channel designed for crisis communication. The message - that cyber intrusions need to stop.