Congress is involved in the long-running and costly decision regarding the future production of

"pits"; a pit is a nuclear weapon's plutonium core. Rocky Flats Plant (CO) mass-produced pits

during the Cold War; production ceased in 1989. The Department of Energy (DOE), which

maintains U.S. nuclear weapons, then established a small pit manufacturing capability at PF-4, a

building at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (NM). PF-4 has made at most 11 pits per

year (ppy). DOE also proposed higher-capacity facilities; none came to fruition.

On March 24-25, world leaders will gather to address the threat of nuclear terrorism, which President Obama has called "the most immediate and extreme threat to global security."

Over the course of my writing, teaching and corresponding about China's nuclear forces, I kept stumbling over the same question: Why does China insist on calling the Second Artillery, China's nuclear-armed missile force, the "core force" for China's deterrent?

A senior Iranian legislator voiced optimism about the settlement of the nuclear standoff between Tehran and the West, and said Iran and the world powers have gained an understanding of stances of each others.

The head of NATO says Russia's incursion into Ukraine may affect the prospects for nuclear arms controlin Europe, which already faced political challenges.

This report is based on discussions of the Nuclear Security Governance Experts Group (NSGEG) at its workshop on Preventing Weak Links in Nuclear Security: A Strategy for Soft and Hard Governance held on October 16-18, 2013 in Warrenton, Virginia. This workshop, part of a continuing project on nuclear security, was convened during the Stanley Foundation's 54th Annual Strategy for Peace Conference and organized by the Stanley Foundation with support from the Asan Institute for Policy Studies and Partnership for Global Security. This report and its recommendations draw upon major strands of discussion developed at the workshop and in its papers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of individual NSGEG members or other workshop participants who neither reviewed nor approved this document.