Inside The Biggest Uranium Deal In 50 Years | Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter

If you think about all economic activity, any major strategic thing the US is trying to do or any country is trying to do, it ultimately gets back to energy. And we think that the way that energy is going to grow in the decades ahead is nuclear. It is the cleanest, safest form of base load. It just hasn't been the cheapest. And so we want to make it the cheapest.

The US is the first to develop enrichment during World War II, obviously, and during the Cold War, we were doing a tremendous amount of enrichment. We were something like 86% of worldwide enrichment capacity. Now, we're really in last place. And so, we're trying to restore that on US soil this decade.

The Biden administration set a goal of tripling nuclear by 2050. They made international commitments for that. And then the Trump administration increased that to quadruple to 4x 2050. And so this is a completely bipartisan thing that nuclear is going to grow 3 to 4x in the coming decade. So that now puts it at $10 billion market in the US alone.

China and Russia are now really the providers of something like 70% of new reactors built internationally. And that the US has lost a lot of influence over this area. Despite having great reactor designs, we haven't been deploying them and we haven't been able to fuel them. And so Russia and China's contracts often come in very long fuel relationships that we've been unable to compete with.

So it was really this wake up call for the industry of, hey, we need to move faster or we need to do things differently.

Scott Nolan spent a year looking for an American nuclear enrichment company to invest in at Founders Fund. He could not find a single one. Concerned by America's dependence on adversaries like Russia and certain that enrichment would only become more essential as demand for energy rises, Scott decided to found a company of his own, General Matter, now less than a year after its unveiling.

And General Matter has already closed on a facility in Paduca, Kentucky, and was recently awarded a $900 million contract from the Department of Energy. These are just the first steps of what Scott hopes will become the dominant American enrichment company built to power the next century.

In today's conversation, we discuss how nuclear enrichment works and why it matters, the parallels between general matter and Scott's former employer, SpaceX, lessons learned from Peter Teal, and the future of energy in the age of AI. I'm Mario and this is the generalist.

Well, Scott, I have been super looking forward to this for a long time. One, because I really enjoyed getting to know you through the Founders Fund series and thought you'd had such an interesting history. And then when you took the wraps off of General Matter, it was clear that you were going to build one of the most ambitious companies of hopefully the next 50 years or beyond. So, I'm super excited to talk nuclear enrichment and all things related to energy today.

Yeah, thank you for having me on. Excited to be here. And as you said, last time we talked, I think we were deep in stealth building building the company. Didn't mention anything about it, but we've been at this for over two years at this point and just came out of stealth in April of last year. So, excited to share a lot more.

Yeah, I'm excited to maybe set some of the big picture for people up front so that, you know, we can sort of understand why this is so important. To start with, I think it's worth noting that I think what you're doing is maybe a first ever to build a venturebacked American nuclear enrichment facility. Is that fair to say?

That's right.

So, so big picture on what we're doing. We are the American enrichment company enriching using American technology here in the US and specifically a focus on uranium for nuclear energy. And so, like you said, we're we will be the first private company to develop technology to enrich uranium in the US and to bring a commercial facility online.

We can talk more about that facility later, but we do think this is one of the most important things we could possibly be working on. If you think about all economic activity, any major strategic thing the US is trying to do or any country is trying to do, it ultimately gets back to energy. Energy is upstream of all economic activity.

And we think that the way that energy is going to grow in the decades ahead is nuclear. It's it is the cleanest, safest form of base load. It just hasn't been the cheapest. And so we want to make it the cheapest. And so if nuclear is the way that things grow, that energy grows in the US and abroad, fuel is a necessary input for that.

So if fuel is upstream of energy and the one missing step in the fuel supply chain for nuclear is enrichment. And so we are bringing enrichment capability back to the US where US used to be the leader. Now we're really in last place. And so we're trying to restore that on US soil this decade.

So that's the big picture of what we're working on and we always just say you know enrichment upstream of fuel fuels upstream of energy at energies upstream of everything else. So we think this is one of the the the most fundamental capabilities we need to bring back to the US.

You know, in researching this episode, the history piece that you alluded to there was so interesting to me that America really was the, you know, obviously the leader in sort of nuclear technology in general, but then also an enrichment for a really long period of time until it did sort of slip back into last place. And so you're sort of revitalizing something that was once a core competency that has really degraded massively over the past couple of decades.

That's right. That's right. The US is the first to develop enrichment during World War II obviously and then quickly use that for nuclear energy and during the cold war we we were doing a tremendous amount of enrichment we were something like 86% of worldwide enrichment capacity that was through a combination of different sites in the US you know Paduka Kentucky Oakidge Tennessee and Portsouth Ohio and the US was by far the leader and then with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war we started offshoring that and shutting down our own capability to let foreign allies and now foreign adversaries do that for us.

It seemed to make economic sense, but I think strategically it was a mistake. And now we're seeing that with the growth of nuclear, we really need it back. And so that's that's what we're trying to do.

We'll get more into the weeds on this, I'm sure, and also into this next question, but for folks just to sort of give themselves a rough sense in their heads. I'm sure many people will know about it, but what is the right way to think about like what enrichment fundamentally is doing and and why that's so important to make nuclear fuel?

There's really five steps. The first one is that you need to get uranium out of the ground. So that's mining mining and milling is what that's referred to as. You then take that mind product and you convert it into a gas. That's a conversion step, step two. Step three is enrichment, where you're really just separating that gas. And then you turn it back into a solid and a decon conversion step. And then finally you do fuel fabrication to get your fuel pellet type. And there's a range of different pellet types.

The enrichment step is really, you know, it's it's really a refining step. It's a separation step. There are no chemical reactions involved. There's even no nuclear reactions involved. So it's really it's really a refining a refining process, a separation process. completely inert process working with chemicals to to separate different isotopes of uranium.

And so the isotope that we want that reactors need to to conduct fision is U235. And so we want to separate out the others primarily U238 which does not aid in the fision reaction. And so, you know, if you're talking about reactors that most people are familiar with, the classic lightwater reactor with the cooling towers, those run on on on uranium that's enriched to about 3 to 5% U235. Out of the ground, it's only at 7%. So, we need to get that that level of U235 up, which is where the refining comes in.

And then if we're talking about modern reactors, SMR, small modular reactors, typically they're going to want to use something called Halo, which is enriched to just under 20%. And we can talk about why that is, but but what we're trying to fundamentally do is take something that comes out of the ground at 7% U235 and refine it or enrich it up to either 3 to 5% or 19.75%.

For someone who wasn't familiar with your background and maybe wasn't familiar with Founders Fund, it would sound extremely strange that a venture investor after, you know, 13 years of investing in great companies would say, you know, I'm the right person to bring nuclear enrichment back to America. But if people do know the story of your firm and and your background, it it really starts to make a lot of sense in many ways. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about that and hear from you where the the parallels are in your own story and and maybe even just beginning at the beginning which is, you know, as I recall you telling me in in interviewing you for the Founders Fund series, you really were the sort of kid who was just constantly tinkering with things and building rockets and deeply interested in sort of engineering to the extent that kids, you know, can can show that proclivity.

Yeah. And that that was always an interest of mine and it first showed up in in rockets as you mentioned and you know did rockets all throughout high school and in college and designed them and built them which led to me working at SpaceX right out of school and you know if you think back to 2002 working on a private space company was not something a lot of people were thinking about. It was it was kind of a weird unusual thing and I think I joined in 2003 and I think Elon was thinking about the company in 2001 2002 and a lot of people told him don't do it. That's a a really weird thing to be excited about in the midst of this, you know, internet era, even post.com.

And so SpaceX was was maybe something that was off people's radar at that point, but there was a lot of thematic overlap where the the goal of that company was to bring back, you know, US capability and space launch to make it competitive and by reducing the cost and increasing reliability, you know, make there be a lot more activity in space. And so I was extremely aligned with Ed coming out of college. Had worked on rockets for years. It was it was a thing that I really wanted to do even though a lot of people questioned it. And then obviously we see the benefits of now of having the US in the lead on space launch where the US is doing something like 90% of mass to orbit. Um and with China as number two. And if if we had never done that, we'd be looking to China for all our our space launch capability. That would be a bad situation.

So, so I yeah started my career in space, you know, then went to Founders Fund. I think that might have looked also like a nonsequitator in a lot of ways, but I think the piece that was that was the same for for both of those was was this framework of what you what should you work on? And the framework I I kind of found that I think Peter at Founders Fund did a great job of articulating a few years back was this these three criteria where the criteria are basically you know what is something important that is otherwise not going to happen that you are uniquely capable of working at.

You know early in my career that was that was space. I had an you know masters in aerospace engineering very obvious to go work in space. I thought space was important. I thought it was something that really no one else was working on besides SpaceX, not not in the proper way and that I could contribute to uniquely. And then after SpaceX, you know, went to went to Founders Fund. And at Founders Fund, we have to remember like go back to 2010, there wasn't a ton of interest in engineering driven companies at that point. you know, with my background in engineering plus some business experience that I'd gotten in in a couple years prior, it seemed like that combination would satisfy the formula, too, where it would be, okay, what's something important funding engineering driven companies that's maybe otherwise not going to happen the right way.

And I think at that point, if you were an engineering driven company, most VCs would want to go find a business person to be the founder, to be the CEO. So, a lot of replacement of of CEOs in those days. Um and then where where you know where the skills could uniquely line up and the combination of of engineering and business background felt like that was right and and Founders Fund was doing something that no one else was doing at that point.

And so so yeah 12 years we're trying to back the right companies full-time at founders fund and then now general matter where same exact formula you know spent spent over a year looking at the space realized that nobody else was really doing a commerciallydriven US enrichment capability nobody was trying to bring the cost down dramatically to get more nuclear felt like if we didn't do it nobody would and that this was extremely important for the reasons we mentioned earlier you know being outstream of nuclear being upstream of all energy growth.

And then finally, you know, oddly, I felt like my background was really pretty ideal for this where a while I was looking around for, you know, a team that we could maybe assemble to go do this and then realize that I should I should be the one to lead it. And I was just given a lot, you know, long background in engineering, a lot of which would be relevant to the, you know, the the business and the technology that we would develop. um some business background and ability to get US clearance which I'd had before prior to SpaceX and the ability to raise capital for what would be a pretty capital intensive project. So, you know, very different area than aerospace, very different area than venture capital, but felt like it satisfied the three criteria.

Going back to to SpaceX in in 2002 2003, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I think you maybe have mentioned before that it was somewhere around 30 people at the time. Is that is that right?

When I was an intern, it was 30ome and then I, you know, wrapped up school for six months and came back and it was maybe 50some. So, still early days. I think I think a lot of people think 50 people is a big company and I probably thought that at some point in my career, but I now realize how how early that was.

You know, I think we've probably many many people who are obsessed with technology and and company building know sort of some of the the pieces of the SpaceX story or at least what's you know the the public version of it. But even thinking about the intangibles, I imagine there was a really clear energy to that group of people and a really clear sense of mission that you know couldn't have been stronger in many ways at at that early stage pre any proof when you're in the midst of failed launches. Are there certain things that you've taken from those days in particular and tried to sort of breed into the general matter culture or certain you know almost granular or really tactical practices that you know you took from those days picking a really ambitious project and saying you know this is how we sort of march towards it bit by bit at the cadence that we need to uh knowing that you know this is maybe a far far off goal but we need to make progress towards it.

Yeah, I think I think we could go into a lot of different lessons learned from SpaceX and a lot of heruristics, rules of thumb, you know, the algorithm, all those things that a lot of people have talked about and we can talk about those. I I think the most important thing was that at SpaceX, we were just trying to solve a very specific mission, reduce the cost of launch. And yes, this would have all these huge downstream implications like the ability to, you know, develop Mars at some point, the ability to get something like Starlink. Just much more activity in space, commercialized in space.

On a day-to-day basis, most people didn't really think about that. We didn't really focus on that. The real focus day to day was just what whatever was immediately in front of us. What technical challenge did we have to overcome to achieve the mission of reducing the cost of launch? And so everything was hyperfocused on that. We had one metric. It was dollars per per kilo into low earth orbit. How do we solve that?

And so I think the big thing was that we had a very clear mission and everyone believed that the mission was really important. And then the reality is that on a day-to-day basis you just focus on the details and execution. And so I think that's, you know, that's something that we have at General Matter also. So everyone knows why we're doing this. We know that there's this complete lack of US enrichment, which means that the US can't produce its own fuel for its own reactors, which are about 20% of the grid, and can't produce any of the fuel for advanced reactors, which is the future of nuclear.

And so we know that this is really important. We do have a very clear metric. The clear metric is the price of enrichment. Let's just focus on dropping the price of enrichment. There's a lot of ways to do that. um while maintaining safety and reliability or increasing them and we can talk about why those things are not at odds and then on a day-to-day basis we're focusing on on the details of execution and so um you know I think both have this parallel of pick a really important mission align the team around how to solve that mission and then everybody just kind of gets to work and and then there's a lot of ways in the day-to-day that that we try to do that effectively.

During the decad plus you spent at Founders Fund. You've obviously worked with some other amazing company builders, you know, someone who was on the podcast before, Trey Stevens, you know, has built an amazing business with Andrew, obviously Peter Teal, uh, and and many others that you've invested in. When you sort of reflect back on the person you were when you joined the fund and the person who started general matter, what did you notice were sort of maybe the biggest shifts in your own thinking, your own sort of model for how to address these kinds of problems? Like I imagine you were you must have been already a a highly ambitious person to to work at SpaceX, but perhaps there were even some yeah augmentations to that or or shifts to it.

Yeah, when I started at Founders Fund in 2011, I did have that SpaceX experience behind me. I had, you know, I'd been been part of what would become one of the most important companies and got to see how that was built from the very beginning. I think when I began at Founders Fund, um, a natural focus was to focus on early stage. probably the first few years I was there um you know it it seemed as though the right answer was to just uh work with a lot of companies to let them get off the ground to fund their initial development and to have a reasonable number of shots on goal in in the in the VC framing.

And the idea was that if maybe if you got involved early and had insight about the technology and realized that there was a real opportunity, you could, you know, you could do better as an investor by being in earlier and getting rewarded for that early insight. You know, towards the end of the 2010s at by that point, I think I'd realized that it's better to concentrate. So it's instead of having a lot of bets with early stage companies where there's so much execution, there's so there's so much that still has to happen beyond the initial insight. It can be better to just work very closely with the team that you really believe in and uh just fully concentrate all of your time and energy into a tiny handful of of efforts.

And so really by the end of the 2010s, early early 2020s, I had pivoted that strategy of working with a lot of different companies that were all working on really interesting important things, but being spread kind of thin across them and and not concentrating capital into to any of them to the extent that that we might want to to taking an approach of working really deeply deeply with companies that I thought were underappreciated and doing something huge. So it went from this idea of early concepts, early technologies being the interesting thing to these really really huge missions being the much more important thing.

And so some of the you know some of the really larger investments post 2020 were the Boring Company, Neurolink, a handful of others. Uh prior to that really I think around 2018 company called New Bank down in Brazil that was doing something really important around fintech. Yes. So it was I think that was the primary evolution over over about a decade was you know interesting ideas, interesting technologies, compelling compelling technologists to then really just focusing on companies that were executing against a really huge mission and try to put all the energy there.

You mentioned that, you know, you spent a year looking for, you know, the the nuclear enrichment company that you then went on to build. To take it even a step, you know, back in in the sort of process that that brings us to general matter. When did this sort of even appear on your radar as something worth thinking about, a problem that needed to be solved, you know, in some dynamic that at least even opened your aperture for it?

Founders Fund had always been, you know, interested in nuclear. We had done a few nuclear investments over the the decade prior and I think it's one of these one of these retro technologies. You know, if you think back to the 50s and you know, Founders Fund's tagline for a while was we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters. And you know, the flying car thing was really something from the 50s when people believed that technology would make their lives much better. And if you think back to that era, the two really exciting sectors that people thought about were space and nuclear. Those were really the the two primary ones. There may have been things around agriculture and nutrition and longevity, but from a pure hardware technology standpoint, it was it was energy and space and it was nuclear in space.

And SpaceX did the first one. And Founders first invested in 2008. And then from about 2011 onward, we'd been looking really closely at nuclear. We'd invested in a couple companies. We'd been tracking the space. Over that time, I probably met almost every nuclear founder that passed through Silicon Valley. And it was an area I always thought was this huge promising area that just had not lived up to its potential.

You know, you you fast forward over that decade to 2022, and Founders Fund had had been talking for a couple years with a company called Radiant, and Radiant was making an SMR, small modular reactor, micro reactor that fit in a shipping container and made about a megawatt of electricity. Wow. And what Radiant told us was something we'd heard before, but we went into more depth around it. And Founders Fund made a made an investment in Radiant at their series A. And what Radium told us was, you know, we we prompted the question of what's hardest about the company. And we thought the answer was going to be getting through NRC approval and getting a license to to deploy and operate this reactor. And they said, you know, sure, that's that's something we need to do, but there's a pretty clear path and we're not too worried about it. And the NRC is actually great to work with and the hard thing is getting fuel.

And so, you know, they said, "We can only get our fuel from Russia or maybe China and it's difficult to get from Russia and it's extremely expensive and it's really, you know, it's a challenge." And so I said, "Okay, that's strange. I know that you need this fuel that's enriched up to almost 20%. Is enriching to that level much harder? Why don't the US enrichment companies and the nuclear fuel companies make make the fuel that you need?" as Halo Radian said, "What do you mean US enrichment companies? They're they're really hard."

And that led to a whole series of of work in 2023 realizing, okay, the advanced reactor sector may not succeed without a source of fuel and they can't wait forever. They're all they're mostly startups. And 20% of our grid runs on lowenrich uranium in lightwater reactors that are already deployed, 94 of them across the country. you know, if if 20% of our grid is dependent on foreign suppliers, that doesn't seem good. Um, and you you look into this further and you realize that 25% of that is Russia and the rest is Europe, but the Russian component is now under a ban. And yes, that ban goes into full effect on January 1st, 2028. And so, we will have about a 25% shortfall in fuel supply in the US at that point.

And then you think forward to even things like well what about you know what about our our aircraft carriers and our submarines they're operating on a on a stockpile that won't last forever. So clearly this the supply chain in the US has to come back and we can't do it in a way that's just um you know needs to be subsidized forever and doesn't compete internationally. And we can blame other countries for subsidizing their industries, but ultimately we need to compete and we can't make excuses. And so our approach is, you know, if this is going to work, we need to we need to do this commercially and we need to stand on our own two feet and therefore we've got to bring the cost down a lot. And so that's that's kind of how we arrived at this. That's how we realized the need.

And all throughout 2023, I was looking for companies that were, you know, getting started enriching uranium. is is anyone doing this? And um by August of of 2023 realized that nobody was and that it would require a new company to go do it.

Why do you think no one had recognized that as a sufficiently interesting opportunity or decided to go after it? Was you know the market deemed unattractive in some in some sense? Was it just deemed you know extremely difficult? like it seems so so obviously important when you tell this story but uh these things can often be disguised uh for you know before someone sees it as clearly as as you did clearly.

Yeah. I think you know if we talk about the 2022 2023 time frame even working on an advanced reactor was deemed you know probably a strange thing to do and that this was one level of of of abstraction from that maybe two levels. First you have to care about advanced reactors. Then you need to care about fuel and then you have to realize that enrichment is the missing piece. So it's not something a lot of people would naturally come across or think about. You know again this was pre any Russian uranium ban. This was pre any growth in AI data centers and that boom that's really been a big tailwind for for nuclear and made us realize yes need more energy production.

And so I think I think it was just something that people weren't thinking about. They were barely thinking about reactors. certainly not thinking about fuel and um I think it's only in the last couple years that it's it's really become obvious to most people how important this is and then there's probably a few other ways to get at this. I think, you know, we will be the first private company to go do this and there may be an element of, you know, wondering if this is even the territory for a private company and and only through long conversations with the DOE were, you know, did we realize that that this was a need and that this would be supported. And so I think it's just the type of space that's that's a little bit off the off the map and seemingly, you know, something that that private companies hadn't done before.

And I think it was also viewed as something that couldn't be very profitable. That was just the domain of, you know, nation states subsidizing the activity for strategic purposes and not something that you could bring down the cost and compete with adversaries who were maybe subsidizing their production. Maybe it t took being very close to the SpaceX story to really realize that even when the costs look like they're not coming down in a sector. Um if that is, you know, if that is a sector that's been dominated by government efforts that have a different goal than than reducing cost or being purely commercial or if it's dominated by cost plus players, there's not a big incentive to bring cost down and you probably can if you focus on that. And so that was that was really our path to realizing that not only was this needed, but that it was something we should go do.

You know, maybe this is my my storytelling, my narrative brain, you know, looking for for more drama than the reality of it. But was there like a particular moment for you where you thought I just simply have to build this myself, you know, I after maybe a slew of these meetings in a in a given week or or some amount of banging your head against something?

Yeah, it was it was really realizing, you know, in early 23 that the US didn't have this capability and then doing that search for companies and having some hope that we would we would find one or two and then yeah, by August realizing that that even the ones that we hoped would do it were not likely to be in a position to really do this in a a the commercially competitive way that we wanted to do it that could bring the prices down dramatically. And that that was really the key thing. It was, you know, there's certainly an onshoring component to this and bringing back domestic domestic capability that we're we care about that, you know, our team would do this for alone, but the thing that really is the north star is let's make nuclear energy expand. Let's make it grow into what it always should have been.

And to do that, you know, there's three three things you have to do. It's I think people will go for an energy source that is clean, safe, base load and then also lowest cost. And so that was the missing piece that that we wanted to solve through through enrichment.

You founded the company with Lee Robinson. How did that sort of initial team come together and you know as you thought about your strengths and knowledge like what were the pieces you were trying to to sort of fill?

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a a larger founding team than that which has been talked about before, but Lee was one of the early team members and and one of the really faces of the company given his experience. And so yeah, Lee and I met through a couple different intros at the exact same time. He was running, you know, within the DoD there's a program called DIU, Defense Innovation Unit, and they do funding of early stage companies. and he was he was really doing the reactor program. And so a couple people put us in touch and and said, "Hey, you know, I know that you're looking around for fuel. You're trying to figure out what's happening in that area with this program in the army. Maybe they have a source of fuel. Maybe they have other things that that you should learn about. Go talk to Lee."

And so I got put in touch with Lee. We started talking. I asked him, "Hey, you know, we're investing in in SMRs at Founders Fund and they don't seem to have a source of fuel. Does the does the army have a source of fuel? I sure hope the army has a source of fuel because obviously you're doing this program." And then he looked into it and realized, "No, no, we don't." And everybody is looking for the same halo that that is not currently made. And only way to get it is from the DOE doing down blending operations or finding other supply that's that's in relatively short supply. And I think that turned him on to this problem and he spent a couple months looking into it and and became as concerned as I was about it and said, "Okay, this is this is what I need to work on next as well."

I I then recruited a few other people onto the team. We got started in late 2023 and um yeah have been have been growing ever since.

This may be a bit of a diversion but you said down blending and I have no idea what that process is and it sounded quite interesting.

Yeah that's um you know you enrich up to a certain level. So if you think of concentrating E2 235 you can also dilute it. And so, um, the US does have stockpiles of of uranium that's enriched to above 20%.

Oh, interesting. They can just blend in for weapons presumably, right?

Um, or fuel for the Navy. And so, in terms of weapons, there's way more than enough warheads. And I think other weapons, I don't believe even use uranium. Um, it's it's not really um the the current generation technology. So, really, when we talk about stockpile, it's really for the Navy. that's really to run the reactors that are in subs and aircraft carriers. And so, you know, that stockpile is is is very precious. And so, we don't want to reduce that at all. But one way to make Halo is to take that and and dilute it down, which is really doing negative work. Um, taking a really valuable asset and making it less valuable, but that is, you know, potentially necessary for doing some initial testing on on these reactors. So that was really the only other option apart from a small amount of Halo that's that's available and has been identified and mostly allocated to reactors that's ours and so there's there's a desperate need for new supply.

Maybe we could talk a moment about how this came to pass because you know we maybe started this conversation a little bit talking about how the US had led in this and then you know to to get to the point that you identify in in 2023 where you realize 25% is coming from Russia the rest is coming from Europe 0% is coming from America itself. I think you alluded to the falling of the Berlin wall but what were the specific pressures that allowed that to happen?

Yeah. So if we if we recap it again, the US was the first to do enrichment. It did it using something called a gaseous diffusion approach. That was the first generation technology. It's what allowed the the US to win World War II. And we did that at a couple sites in the US. And at those sites, the US did a ton of production and became the world leader. like I said over 80 over 80% of global supply all the way up until the fall of the Berlin wall and at that point the cold war ended and there was this question of what should we do about enrichment at this point one of the most important policy you know international efforts was around disarmament we the US and Russia