June 4, 2015
From June 1-4, 2015, an international seminar on the oral history of the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program was held in Astana, Kazakhstan, with participation by senior diplomats and experts from the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan, including those who had been involved in the CTR efforts. Dr. William Potter, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, was one of the featured speakers.
Conference photo courtesy of Astana Times.
Commonly referred to as the Nunn-Lugar program— named after former US Senators Sam Nunn (Democrat of Georgia) and Richard Lugar (Republican of Indiana) who initiated the legislation—CTR provided various forms of assistance for the purpose of securing and eliminating nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from the former Soviet Union.
Kazakh Senate President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev with Bill Potter
The experts who gathered in the three-day, mostly closed-door sessions discussed past and ongoing cooperative efforts. The goal of the conference, according to Kazakh Minister of Foreign Affairs Erlan Idrissov, was to “extract […] important lessons for the formation of future policies based on the principles of nonproliferation and aimed at reducing the threat of conflict with the use of weapons of mass destruction.”
For more information, see the article in the Astana Times.
