NSOI is a U.S. government effort to enhance international assistance to combat smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials.
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The Nuclear Smuggling Outreach Initiative (NSOI) seeks to cooperate with countries where the smuggling threat is greatest to assist them to improve their abilities to prevent, detect, and respond to incidents of nuclear smuggling.
NSOI engages those countries seen to be at greatest risk of smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials in or through their territories. The NSOI team works with the government of each such country to jointly assess its strengths and shortcomings in its ability to combat the nuclear smuggling threat. This assessment focuses particularly on identifying gaps in existing capabilities and priority needs for improvement.
Based on this joint assessment, NSOI negotiates a joint action plan with the partner government specifying in detail agreed steps to address priority needs, including ongoing efforts that should be completed as well as new efforts that should be undertaken. Based on this plan, the NSOI team and partner government also agree on a list of assistance projects focused on those steps in the plan that the partner nation cannot implement alone.
Once the action plan and list of priority assistance projects are agreed, the partner government begins to implement the action plan steps it can take on its own, while the NSOI team engages U.S. and international assistance providers to seek donors for each project and to coordinate among these donors to ensure that the full set of contributions is provided in a coherent manner. For this purpose, NSOI creates a set of fact sheets that describe the projects in some detail and are distributed to potential donors for their consideration. The NSOI team stands ready to meet with any potential donor for more in-depth discussions of any project from its list which that donor might be interested in supporting.
NSOI is currently seeking support for anti-nuclear smuggling assistance projects in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the Kyrgyz Republic, will shortly do the same for Tajikistan and Armenia, and intends to engage about 20 additional high-risk countries in the future. To date, eight countries and three international organizations have committed to support various of these projects, but much more remains to be done.
For more on how NSOI fits with other related U.S. Government programs, click here
Fissile material -- highly-enriched uranium (HEU) or weapon-grade plutonium -- is the critical ingredient in building a nuclear weapon. Most experts agree that terrorists are not able to produce fissile material, but a reasonably sophisticated terrorist organization could make a crude nuclear weapon, or improvised nuclear device (IND), if it stole or acquired a sufficient quantity and quality of such material. Therefore, combating smuggling of weapons-usable nuclear materials is vital to preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons.