Nuclear Issues

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.

When the Academy Award-winning producer of An Inconvenient Truth,Lawrence Bender, wanted to create a new nuclear proliferation film, he turned to leading experts at the Belfer Center.

Graham Allison notes that the themes developed at President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit and its agenda of action, including countries' specific work plans, reflect the Belfer Center's analytic efforts over more than a decade.

Belfer Center alumni Gary Samore and Laura Holgate played a key role in organizing President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit in April. Additionally, MatthewBunn's Securing the Bomb 2010 was released the day the Summit began, and Graham Allison provided attending leaders with materials that included a nuclear terrorism threat assessment and fact sheet.

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.

In mid-March, the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom (MTA) Project, together with Professor Li Bin of Tsinghua University, convened back-to-back workshops in Beijing on ways to strengthen U.S.-Chinese cooperation across a broad agenda of issues.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen spent more than two dozen years in intelligence, both in the CIA and U.S. Department of Energy. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he led the U.S. government's efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had WMD capabilities and to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States. He is now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center. In January, Mowatt-Larssen published a timeline of al Qaeda's attempts to acquire WMD.

Are China and the United States destined to become adversaries? The Belfer Center and the greater Harvard community are driving efforts to study the meteoric rise of China and to work with China to ensure a positive future relationship.

Jeffrey Lewis recently joined the Belfer Center as the executive director of the Managing the Atom Project. MTA is a cooperative effort by two programs at the Center aimed at bringing together scholars and practitioners to conduct policy-relevant research on key strategic issues affecting the future of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy technology.