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A conversation with UN Under-Secretary-General Sigrid Kaag, the Special Coordinator for the OPCW-UN Joint Mission to eliminate the chemical weapons program in Syria, hosted by Future of Diplomacy Project Executive Director Cathryn Clüver.

Following a U.S.-Russian proposal and UN Security Council resolution in September, the challenging task of securing, transporting, and ultimately destroying Syria's chemical weapons has fallen largely to the technical experts of the Nobel Prize-winning Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). To provide a background on chemical weapons and the OPCW's challenges ahead, research assistant Andrew Wojtanik asked Dr. Matthew Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, for his insights.

Did the U.S. threat of force push Bashar Assad's regime to relinquish its chemical weapons? International Security Program Fellow Marisa Porges isn't so sure. Porges dives into the complicated situation in Syria, analyzing the interests of various players including the Russians, the United States, and the hundreds of individual groups that comprise the Syrian resistance

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, argues that despite not falling victim to a major terrorist event in the last 10 years, the United States must not be complacent in its counter-terrorism efforts. Mowatt-Larssen said in a Belfer Center seminar in September that he believes the possibility of a major attack is higher in the next 10 years than in the preceding decade.