This report responds to these challenges in three ways. First, it provides an in-depth exploration of methods of overcoming impediments to existing cooperation in greater depth. Second, it examines the potential for expanded cooperation, based on a fuller concept of partnership. Third, it offers specific conclusions and recommendations that can be used to achieve the first two goals. The report records the consensus of Russian and American committee members on concrete and well-defined steps that can be taken to improve cooperative efforts that will have utility and relevance in both countries. The participants, in rendering this joint report, offer these recommendations to their governments, to nongovernmental organizations involved in the cooperation, and to the broader community of nonproliferation experts in the hope that they will be tools that can be used to strengthen cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation.

Members of the joint committee relied primarily on two mechanisms to gather the information on which this report is based: commissioned papers by U.S. and Russian experts, which appear as appendixes to this report, and meetings of joint committee members with small groups of experts in Moscow and Washington in January and February 2005. The experts who participated in those meetings are listed in Appendix E. To encourage candor, the joint committee promised participants in the meetings that their comments would not be attributed to them.