The Nuclear Smuggling Outreach Initiative (NSOI) seeks to enhance partnerships with key countries around the world to strengthen capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to incidents of nuclear smuggling.  It focuses on both bilateral partnerships to improve such capabilities and donor partnerships to support these improvements.

In its bilateral partnerships, NSOI engages those countries seen to be most important to the global effort to combat smuggling of nuclear or highly radioactive materials.  The NSOI team works with the government of each such country to reach a common understanding on its current capabilities to counter the nuclear smuggling threat, to survey its ongoing cooperation with U.S. programs and other international donors and organizations to improve those capabilities, and to  identify gaps in capabilities that need to be further addressed.

Based on the results of this joint review, NSOI negotiates a Joint Action Plan with the partner government specifying in detail agreed, priority steps to improve its anti-nuclear smuggling capabilities.  This plan includes both ongoing efforts that should be completed as well as new efforts that should be undertaken, and thus serves to place all relevant cooperative activities with the partner government into a single, coherent framework.  In parallel with development of the Joint Action Plan, the NSOI team and partner government also agree, as needed, on a list of cooperative projects to help the partner government implement the plan.

In its donor partnerships, NSOI engages those countries that have resources or expertise that can be provided to improve the capabilities of other countries.  The NSOI team works with the governments of potential donor partners to identify their particular interests and assets for such assistance.  It then offers these governments menus of cooperative projects with the bilateral partners that fit those interests and assets.  Finally, once a donor partner identifies a cooperative project it wants to support, the NSOI team works with that partner to facilitate its contribution and to coordinate it with relevant, ongoing activities, to ensure that the full set of contributions is provided in a coherent manner. 

To help donor partners in identifying cooperative projects of interest, NSOI creates a set of fact sheets that describe the projects in some detail and are distributed to these partners for their consideration.  The NSOI team stands ready to meet with any potential donor for more in-depth discussions of any project from the fact sheets which that donor might be interested in supporting.

NSOI has to date completed Joint Action Plans and developed anti-nuclear smuggling cooperative projects with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Armenia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Slovakia.  It has engaged several additional bilateral partners with whom it plans to complete such documents soon, and it plans to engage several more over the coming years.  NSOI has also developed donor partnerships with twelve countries and three international organizations, and hopes to create more such partnerships over the coming years.

For more on how NSOI fits with other related U.S. Government programs, click here