System combat for wmd. They sponsor strategic dialogues. And the grant was awarded for the fiscal year 2014, right. So in about october 2013 things were a lot different than they are today in terms of the u. S. Russia relationship. The objectives initially were to explore really verification modalities. If you were actually able to sit down, officially with the russians and negotiate an armed control agreement to limit Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons, how would you go about it and what verification would you think about. Of course, this changed over time. And initially the First Agreement was to sort of set the groundwork and the second meeting was supposed to look at very hardcore issues of an agreement. Instead, what we had was russias annexation of crimea, the u. S. State Department VerificationCompliance Report where the First Official alleviations of russian violations of the treaty and we had sanctions as well know and implementation was moving along. Maybe a little bit more slowly. And so because of this, because of these increased tensions, what we decided to do in october was, okay, lets focus on confidenceBuilding Measures. What can we do in terms of political and technical confidence building members. In october we met in vienna. We had two europeans in june but if we move forward in this process, well include several more. And so in the october. The details are there in the report. Im going to give you some examples. But in october, the themes were we sort of rallies around a few themes. Arms control is never hesy and in times of chris is it is not easy but it is still an important venue if you can use it to build transparency and trust. [ technical difficulties ] in october, all of the participants said official limits on Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons are off the table. Interestingly enough, in october, or this is not a new cold war. In june that tone had changed quite considerably and that really effected the kinds of things that we talked about. We spent a good deal of time we had some representation from u. S. National labs an we talked specifically about Verification Technology and that was one of the areas that we believe could be fruitful, even if were just looking at longerterm Technology Developments. And we also talked about confidenceBuilding Measures in terms of lab to lab cooperation, limited data exchanges and then of course the kind of existing venues of cooperation like the Proliferation Initiative and so we cast our net widely. The next few slides are a long list of things that we talked about. And i welcome, in the q a session, if you want to ask specific questions about them. Obviously the russians are really big on Historical Data exchanges on the president ial nuclear initiatives. These go back to the 1990s. So the idea, is if you have a good baseline of what of what Nuclear Weapons none strategic Nuclear Weapons are out there, then you can move forward from that baseline. They were little, as we were, more squeamish on more current data exchanges. In october, we said, you know, we really cannot reaffirm what we call the nato three noes, which is that we have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy Nuclear Weapons on the territories of new weapons sorry, new Member States of nato. And we could not commit to no modernization. And these were topics that we discussed at length both in october and a little bit in june. On the technical confidenceBuilding Measure area, we had the basic assumption that multilateral confidence Building Measures were the hardest and bilateral at the moment were probably desirable but not so easy to accomplish and that unilateral measures might be okay. All right. So that is a very narrow avenue for doing things. But we still talked about possibly having expert visits to former storage sites in europe and thinking about some of the things that we had done in the past with the russians. For example, the Trilateral Initiative between russia, u. S. And iaea on fissile material. In the longterm the focus was on cross cutting technologies, things like information, transformation, security, data storage and barriers and focus the focus from verification and more on monitoring. There are things we have done in the fissile material area that we might think about in the future. And then we had a Third Working Group that was kind of funny. It was like, well, we talked about political and technical confidence Building Measures, lets think about tangential opportunities. And that group brainstormed and came to the conclusion that wow, we need more security but it is probably not possible right now. But i think everybody agreed we need to create transparency and in the june workshop that was a heavy focus, i would say. So i really am going to try and breeze through the next few slides. In our second workshop, what we tried to do is say, okay, we had a list, a menu of ideas and lets drill down on that. And i asked each participate participant to participant to come up with ideas and put some meat on those bones and circulate it and we came up with an ideas paper and that is in the website and in the package for the second workshop. And in those ideas, i asked folks to focus on military doctrine, transparency, Technology Development, and then safety and security of Nuclear Weapons. And this was kind of the surprise topic, i think, for our second workshop. Which it is kind of counter intuitive. If you are having if your relations are not the best at the moment can you talk about sensitive topics like the safety and security of Nuclear Weapons. And what we decided to do, what we decided was, it is worth a shot. Right. We have a lot of focus on Nuclear Security these days and there have been exercised and cooperation with the russians in the past in some limited ways. And so we have a menu of potential cooperative actions we could take there. All right, so this idea is paper. You can see we had a lot of ideas on the transparenty e transparency idea. It was pretty evenly divided. I cant go through all of this here, a. , because i think it would bore you and b. , because there is a lot of language on those slides. But i think suffice it to say and i know steve will talk specifically about military doctrine. There are a lot of topics we need to talk with the russians about. And specifically, given some of the statements by putin and other lower officials, we need to clarify some topics with them. And they feel the same way. For example, on Ballistic Missile defenses. So transparency, we had a lot and i apologize, this is so dark it. Didnt look this way on my computer. A lot of different ideas for kinds of information we might exchange with the russians. And one particular topic that we talked about at length in june was the inf violations. And i think well discuss a few ideas that that we had for being more transparent about those violations on both sides. Technology development, a lot of stuff emanating from our labs. I think in the future, if we did this again, i would get some Russian Laboratory experts as well. There is a lot of work to be on authentication of information. There was a lot of interest in Remote Monitoring techniques. And fundamentally for Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons, you have a lot of definitional issues which have an impact on the kind of verification that you can explore. Keep going through this. On safety and security of Nuclear Weapons, a few of the ideas that came out were to do a joint threat assessment of the risk of penetration of a storage site. You could also flip that around and do a joint assessment of site seek improvements. You could do some exercises that build on things done with natorussia council on recovery, how could you recover a Nuclear Weapon that was stolen, those kinds of things. Okay. So that is the sort of setup for the workshop and now im going to highlight a few of the themes that we explored. Two more slides. Fundamentally, the u. S. And russia needed new basis for transparency. The old bases dont work. And that is in the 1990s russia was looking forward to somewhat to integration into western institutions and transparency was seen as the price for that. That is no longer viewed in that way. We talked a lot about nuclear messaging and how we have new generations of officials and how we might need to tweak that. We dont know how well that works any more. On the uses of transparency, we suggested that the russians need to clarify the status and the relevance of deescalation concepts. In other words, are they really contemplating the use of Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons to avoid a war or inkurgs. And we talked about Russian Military exercises that would give the appearance of that kind of alarming doctrine. And on the russian side, they said the u. S. Needs to clarify what did ash carter mean in terms of counter i think it was ash carter, right . In terms of counter veiling measures in response to inf. There some surprising misunderstandings given sort of the level and expertise in the room. At least surprising to me. I think we agreed we need a new political umbrella. And that we need some shortterm actions urgently. Fundamentally, i think we agreed that u. S. , nato and russian policymakers need to meet for implementation for current agreements designed for misunderstanding and one of these is the incidents at sea. In the last years there have been over 40 incidents between military forces and and i think right after our meeting, the american im trying to remember an admiral and a russia admiral met in naples to discuss some of that. But we believe it needs to be even broader. We suggested that we should expand the vienna confidence Building Measures to include exchanges of information regarding Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons, High Precision conventional weapons and air and Missile Defenses. And in the shortterm, we had a list of actions that we thought were urgently needed. So we need more information. If you know, we were told well it exists on a classified basis, russian experts, you really need to publish articles on the concept of deescalation. And were told it is not a part of official russian doctrine. We like more confirmation of that. One of our participants recommended that the u. S. Government should consider some transparency measures to demonstrate that the mk 41 launcher for ages for sure cannot contain or launch offensive surface to surface missiles. This is one of the allegations that the russians made. We recommended that they convene joint activities regarding the safety and security of Nuclear Weapons or exchange or exchange such collaboration to include a exchange of best practices. Sorry, that wording is a little off. And then finally, maybe the special Verification Committee under the inf treaty should be reconvened to talk about the allegations on both sides. In the longer term, we think it would be useful to reconvene activities previously conducted by the Nato Russia Council, including military to military to avoid misunderstanding and we think we should resume better technologies for verification and finally we think there needs to be a new review of classification issues regarding Nuclear Warheads. So those are the big sort of items from the two dialogues. And im going to stop there and welcome my colleagues. I think were all just going to sit at this table . We can do it however you like, so they can provide their insights on these two rounds of talks. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, sharon, for inviting me to speak today and also to participate in the two meetings that were held over the past year, october in vienna, and in june, here in washington. Im going to make some brief comments about why i think this exercise was so important and important that we continue. And then some remarks about the domestic political context in russia, which sharon asked me to speak about. So there is a feeling for me, and i think for all of us, of sort of deja vu all over again in having these discussions. As a young, aspiring sovietologist in the 1980s, i cut my teeth on meetings like this. And through the 1990s, dealing with the Nuclear Legacy of the cold war was a very relevant and even urgent topic, i think, for a lot of us. And then something seemed to happen. The topic seemed to the topics of Nuclear Security, nonproliferation, arms control, et cetera, seemed to some extent lose their urgency, from my perspective, and their relevance. And i was thinking about this and talking about it yesterday at lunch with sharon. And what happened . Well, okay, i would i think the Bush Administration, the george w. Bush administration had something to do with this, as they came to power in 2001 with a very different perspective on the value of i think what we refer to as traditional arms control agreements, negotiations, et cetera. Whether one agrees or does not agree, there was the withdrawal from the abm treaty. There was the socalled moscow treaty, which was basically a bone thrown to the russians because the russians wanted a piece of paper in may of 2002. And so they got about 3 1 2 pages of paper in the moscow treaty. Two. Two. [ laughter ] thank you for the correction, steve. It is longer in russian than in english. Russian is a complicated language so it might be three. And the message was the cold war is over. We are no longer enemies. Despite the fact that most of the weapons from the cold war remained where they were, remained on hairtrigger alert, and in many of the same places as to where they were. And then what happened . Well, 9 11. I think this had something to do with how Nuclear Security to some extent went out of vogue. Although, personally, my First Impression my first thought in watching the second airplane go into a World Trade Center building was, as horrific as this is, imagine what a disaster this would be if this involved a weapon of mass destruction, a Nuclear Weapon. But i think something deeper was at work. It seems to me like we kind of and we, i mean, to some extent, the policy community in the United States, that we went on a strategic holiday. And we seem to forget, to some extent, the nature of the existential threat that the weapons present to ourselves and to our planet. Yeah, we had the unipolar moment, and the uroasian wars in iraq and afghanistan. And more talk about Global Warming and climate change, the global jihad and the Global Crisis and mr. Obama did become infatuated with the3 o global z momentarily, until i think he and his administration realized, presumably, that virtually all of the other Nuclear States existing and aspiring had no interest in global zero because Nuclear Weapons were there asymmetric strategic equalizer in trying to prevent making the world safe for american conventional weapons dominance. But thanks to Vladimir Putin, to some extent, it looks like the strategic holiday is over. The ongoing war in ukraine, as sharon alluded to, reminds us that we never did successfully resolve the challenge of building a new European Security system in the quarter century since the end of the cold war. In thousands of the strategic and Nonstrategic Nuclear weapons that we used to agonize over, they are still around. And putin loves to remind us that their still around. And that, yes, russia could incinerate europe and the United States on a moments notice if they so chose. Mr. Yeltsin used to make bombastic, punintended remarks like that, but we could kind of toss it off and say that is old boris, hes had a view vodkas and hes not serious. But when vladimir says this, you know, we kind of look at each other and this dude, hes not really serious, is he . You know, i remember when mr. Obama said in march of 2014 in brussels, just after the annexation of crimea, and he was making a cutting remark about russia, really. And he said russia is just a regional power. What keeps me up at night is the thought of a Nuclear Weapon going off in new york. And honestly, the first thought that came to my mind was dont give him any ideas. Come on. Now, seriously, here we find ourselves in a situation today where Russian Military forces are violating air space, sea space of nato countries at record rates. Nato is preparing to move more forces closer to the russian border. Military exercises on both sides are beefed up and we are coming into much closer proximity to each other as we often did during the cold war and the term the new cold war is already a cliche, whether you agree or no