US-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism

This week, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono and Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera are meeting in Washington with their U.S. counterparts, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, to discuss how the United States and Japan should respond to the latest North Korean provocations. 

The Iran nuclear deal is deeply flawed. Its duration is too short, and it fails to require of Tehran the universally agreed-upon minimum for effective verification — a complete and correct declaration of all relevant activities. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake for President Donald Trump to renounce it now, as he is reportedly contemplating.

The timeline below was compiled by Simon Saradzhyan and Mariana Budjeryn and the foreword was written by William Tobey (author bios below). As an accompaniment, Ms. Budjeryn has also interviewed Sam Nunn, the former senator whose efforts were key to securing U.S. funding to help a disintegrating Soviet Union dismantle and safeguard its nuclear weapons. The timeline authors would like to thank former RM student associate Andre Gellerman for his research support and Susan Koch for her insightful comments. This is an evolving draft, produced in cooperation with the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and with support from the center's Managing the Atom Project. A bibliography can be found at the bottom of the page.

Elbe Group is meeting tackles nuclear terrorism.

William Tobey weighs in on U.S. policy toward Russia.

Siegfried Hecker’s Doomed to Cooperate wins a U.S. national award.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen assesses U.S.-Russian interaction on terrorism.

Olli Heinonen warns that the nuclear terrorist threat is getting increasingly sophisticated.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived in Moscow on Tuesday with perhaps more experience negotiating with Russians than any new secretary of state since John Quincy Adams — whose first diplomatic mission to Saint Petersburg preceded his admission to Harvard, and who served as our young republic’s first minister to the czarist court. Tillerson needs no advice on how to deal with Moscow, but he leaves behind a country riven by arguments about Russia. Democrats are furious over interference in the U.S. presidential election, whereas some Republicans have developed a blind spot in the weather eye they traditionally train on U.S. national security issues. Reestablishing a rough consensus on principles to guide American relations with Russia, therefore, is a high foreign policy priority. Five ideas might start that process.

The threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program is getting worse — much worse. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, meeting Thursday and Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, face an urgent and growing problem that is more severe today than ever before.

Graham Allison’s new book urges U.S, China and Russia to cooperate in preventing nuclear terrorism.

Olli Heinonen and William Tobey weigh in on IAEA’s nuclear security conference.

Siegfried S. Hecker calls for rekindling of U.S.-Russian nuclear security cooperation.

Matthew Bunn co-edits a volume on insider threats.

Note: This is an expanded version of an article with a similar title published 3.7.17 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

The interdependence between the U.S. and Russian space programs persists despite the fact that the two countries are now living through what some pundits describe as a new Cold War. However, there was a time not so long ago when the two nations viewed space solely as an area of strategic competition. The steps that Washington and Moscow took to transform their space rivalry into cooperation can serve today as a model for working together to help prevent nuclear terrorism, no matter how strained relations may seem.

This interdependence between the US and Russian space programs persists even though the two countries are now living through what some pundits describe as a new Cold War. There was a time not so long ago, however, when the two nations viewed space solely as an area of strategic competition. The steps that Washington and Moscow took to transform their space rivalry into cooperation can serve today as a model for working together to help prevent nuclear terrorism, no matter how strained relations may seem.

Based on the rigorous definition of vital U.S. national interests, this essay proposes a prescriptive checklist of U.S. policy steps that would strengthen the domestic base of American external actions; reinforce the U.S. alliance systems in Asia and Europe; meet the Chinese and Russian challenges, while improving the quality of diplomatic exchanges with Beijing and Moscow; reshape U.S. trade policy; gradually pivot from the Middle East to Asia (but not from Europe); maintain the nuclear agreement with Iran; and confront international terrorism more aggressively, but with minimal U.S. boots on the ground in ungoverned areas and without nation building.