Nuclear Issues

During the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, Belfer Center experts published reports and provided commentary and analysis on successes and continuing challenges in nuclear security around the world. Following are some actions they believe are needed to improve the security of nuclear facilities and reduce the possibility of nuclear theft and terrorism.

[Some recommendations are edited for space.]

In the months and weeks before the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., Belfer experts promoted a series of ideas to strengthen measures to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons or the essential ingre­dients to make them.

Matthew Bunn is a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and co-principal investigator for the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom. Bunn’s research focus is on nuclear theft terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and innovation in energy technology. During the Clinton administration, Bunn served as an advisor to the White House Office of Science Technology Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the United States and the former Soviet Union. We asked Bunn about the current crisis in U.S.-Russian relations and its impact on nuclear security.

As a young man in the small city of Ogden, Utah, Brandon Parker found himself increasingly interested in the U.S. Air Force, a service where his step-father had made his career. Recruited by the Air Force Academy to play basketball, Parker didn't initially want to become a pilot. But after his initial flight-screening program, he called his mother out of excitement to let her know that he had found exactly what he was meant to do. Until recently, Lieutenant Colonel Parker commanded a nuclear bomber unit based in North Dakota. This year, Parker a research fellow with the Center's International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom, is conducting research on nuclear nonproliferation.

The Middle East Network of Arms Control Specialists (MENACS) aims to bring together young professionals who work on arms control and regional security issues from the Middle East to promote a better understanding of arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament in the region, and to facilitate indigenous processes and expertise. The network was the idea of Chen Zak, the Middle East project manager at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and a former research fellow with the Belfer Center.

As the United States and Iran approach an historic moment in their relations (or lack thereof), smart diplomatic interaction has never been more important. Belfer Center postdoctoral fellow Robert Reardon highlights the communications trap into which many policymakers fall when trying to explain this issue to the American public.

In October, 2012, at the foot of a rocky hillside in eastern Kazakhstan, a group of American, Russian, and Kazakh nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony marking the completion of a secret 17-year, $150 million operation to secure plutonium in the tunnels of Degelen Mountain—an abandoned site of Soviet underground nuclear testing.

The Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) is launching an initiative aimed at strengthening the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency.  This work, which is supported by a new grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will focus on four main issues.

In preparation for next year’s Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands, the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) is rolling out a series of reports on strengthening international efforts to secure nuclear material around the world. Matthew Bunn and William Tobey, along with other staff and fellows at the Belfer Center, have also begun briefing officials from key states attending the summit on priority steps for reducing nuclear security risks.

As threats from North Korea intensified this spring, Korean Peninsula experts from the Belfer Center provided insight and analysis.