Managing the Atom

The Summer 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features analysis and advice by Belfer Center scholars regarding the historic upheavals in the Middle East and the disastrous consequences of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The Center’s new Geopolitics of Energy project is also highlighted, along with efforts by the Project on Managing the Atom to strengthen nuclear export rules.

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

The Summer 2010 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center's involvement with the Nuclear Security Summit, which was organized by Center alumni Gary Samore and Laura Holgate.

"We have a clear and focused goal to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future," President Barack Obama said in a statement on March 27, 2009. Several members of the Belfer Center community comment on President Obama's plan.

"If ethnic strife should return to Iraq in the post-withdrawal era, the United States must encourage cooperation between regional actors, especially Syria and Iran. By returning to Iraq, America will only further complicate the crisis in an already complex region. Instead, addressing the security concerns of regional actors and focusing on common interests that exist between them and America, and subsequently getting these regional actors' cooperation, would be a less costly way to avoid the return of civil war."

"Like Kenya, Benin and Ghana are ethnically divided countries that have experienced closely fought and possibly flawed presidential elections in recent years. But Benin and Ghana have stronger legislatures, so the losers in presidential elections have less fear of being politically excluded. They have reacted to defeat by using their sway in parliament to control the president, and they have not resorted to mass violence."

"Outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recently concluded efforts to promote the deliberation among the UN’s 192 member states on a global counterterrorism strategy may well represent the most difficult challenge he has faced in what many see as the most difficult job in the world. After months of consultations starting from a debate on Kofi Annan’s recommendations, member states finally reached consensus this past September on such a strategy, the first of its kind in UN history....Difficulties...led Annan to realize that the only way he could achieve a breakthrough on the issue of terrorism was to focus on the practicalities of a counterterrorism strategy. No matter how much member states differ on the definition of terrorism, he reasoned they share the common interest in stable development. This common interest ultimately proved decisive."