A week after the New START agreement’s first birthday, US and Russian inspectors simultaneously conducted the year’s first on-site nuclear inspections. “A Russian team arrived here in the United States to start the first inspection under the new treaty year and the US team arrived in Moscow—so happy Valentine’s Day everybody! We’re off to a good start,” said Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department’s acting arms control chief. “The first treaty year went forward in a very business-like, pragmatic, and productive manner” with the United States and Russia often conducting reciprocal verification inspections within days of one another. “If the Russians declared an inspection, we’d be declaring an inspection a day so [later],” Gottemoeller told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. “I think the pace of implementation in both countries shows the commitment of both countries to implementing the treaty in a methodical and pragmatic way,” she concluded.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
