A policy research project called Russian-American Non-Proliferation and Antiterrorism Cooperation: Test Case of Iran commenced on July 1, 2005, after its funding was endorsed by the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) in June 2005. The leading force of this Project is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace headquartered in Washington, D.C., USA.
The leading Russian force of this Project is the Association for Non-Proliferation and Ecological Improvement (NPEI) headquartered in Moscow, which operates through one of its founding companies -- the Alliance Group. The third leading party to this Project is Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). This Project major participants are Eurasia House International headquartered in London and James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, USA. This Project also involves International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Center of Strategic Research in Tehran, PIR-Center in Moscow, and other organizations in Russia, the USA, Europe, and Iran.
It was while working on its NPT Project on constructing in Russia a facility to store international spent nuclear fuel (SNF) that the Alliance Group decided to initiate this Project. For a long time a major obstacle to a full-scale cooperation between the US and Russia was the so-called problem with Iran -- the USA was suspicious about Russian-Iranian cooperation, especially in the nuclear field, and believed that Russia could pass sensitive military nuclear technologies to Iran.
So the goal of this Project is to develop an efficient model of US-Russian cooperation in these five major areas:
1. To coordinate diplomatic efforts concerning the problem with Iran and other similar issues
2. To take joint actions to reduce nuclear threat
3. To cooperate in new technology research and development
4. To promote joint commercial projects such as the HEU-LEU Deal and, especially, new-type projects such as the NPT Project on constructing a facility in Russia to store international SNF
5. To develop the legal foundation for the new model of US-Russian cooperation.


The major practical purpose of this Project is to improve US-Russian relationships in the area of peaceful nuclear development, which should eventually result in a new bilateral inter-government agreement on the nuclear energy cooperation between the two countries.
Four workshops have been held so far to discuss the research data. The first one was in Moscow in October 2005. The following two were conducted in Stockholm in December 2005 and in August 2006. The fourth was in Houston, Texas in March 2006. The final report on this research was handed over to the President Administrations both in Russia and in the USA. Those activities contributed to a decision taken by two presidents to initiate drafting of an agreement on peaceful nuclear cooperation as was announced in the Presidents joint statement at the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006.