The purpose of the CTR Program was originally "to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states."

As the peace dividend grew old, an alternative 2009 explanation of the program was "to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction in states of the former Soviet Union and beyond".

The warheads themselves were then shipped to and destroyed in Russia, with the highly enriched uranium contained within made into commercial reactor fuel, which was purchased by the United States under a separate program.

By 1997 all strategic Soviet nuclear weapons were removed from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine marking an important landmark in the CTR initiative.

2003 marked an important year for CTR expansion as the initiative was accepted by congress allowing the spread to countries not included within the prior Soviet Union.

[13] The Nunn-Lugar Expansion Act under the 108th congress granted up to $50 million to be used outside the former Soviet Union which focused primarily on Albania, North Korea, Iraq, and Libya.

This expansion of the program is displayed in the 1997 Defense Authorization Act whose purposed served in securing chemical and biological weapon materials.

[14] Nunn-Lugar funds in the year 2004, under the Bush presidency, were provided to eliminate all chemical weapons held within Albania which amounted to roughly $38.5 million.

[14] Border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan militants made U.S. officials uneasy, this alongside the allegations of nuclear arms smuggling caused further talk of Nunn-Lugar program expansion in 2011.

DTRA awarded BV the first BTRIC in Ukraine in 2008, which "is a vital part" of the CTR, entitled Biological Threat Reduction (BTR).

Built near vast reserves of ex-Soviet weaponry at Shchuchye, Kurgan Oblast, in the Ural Mountains, the site is expected to destroy some 5,500 tons of chemical agents, including Sarin and VX.

[18] Although the budget for the CTR program has been cut every year since the Obama administration began, the US still faces many issues when it comes to agreements with Russia in nuclear arms reduction.

The new agreement was intended to reinforce the longstanding partnership on nonproliferation between these two nations and their activities in Russia and the Former Soviet Republics (FSR).

This new bilateral framework authorizes the United States and the Russian Federation to work in several areas of nonproliferation collaboration, including protecting, controlling, and accounting for nuclear materials.

This idea is explained in "countering nuclear weapons proliferation to states and to nonstate actors, the prospects are somewhat better, given mutual Russian and U.S. concerns in that area".

[26] In January 2015 Russian Federation representatives told their US counterparts that Russia would no longer accept US assistance in securing stored weapons-grade nuclear material but said they would continue the program on their own.

[27] In December 2014, the program awarded a $4 million contract to MRIGlobal to "configure, equip, deploy and staff two quick response mobile laboratory systems (MLS) to support the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa."

[28] In 2018, David Franz and Libby Turpen co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control to discuss the next ten years regarding the CTR program.