Nuclear Issues

Assaf Zoran examines the dynamics of Iran's shift from operating in the shadows or behind partners and proxies to directly attacking Israel and Pakistan.

What types of foreign policy cues are most likely to turn public opinion against a popular emerging norm? Since 2017, the U.S. government has sought to discredit the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and its nuclear nonpossession norm among the largely prodisarmament American public. The authors fielded a national U.S. survey experiment (N=1,219) to evaluate the effects of these elite cues as well as social group cues on public opinion. Their study thus offers one of the first experimental assessments of public attitudes toward nuclear disarmament.

Nearly nine months into the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, Washington’s relationship with Beijing has sunk to a historic low. After a high-level diplomatic meeting in March that devolved into an ugly exchange of insults, fruitless visits to China by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, and virtual climate talks that failed to produce clear deliverables, the world’s two great powers have reached a dangerous impasse. 

...If the Biden administration hopes to manage the competition and prevent it from turning into catastrophe, it must take urgent action to establish and maintain open channels of communication between the Pentagon and China’s armed forces.

In managing expectations across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, the Biden administration should aim to release an NPR grounded in clear-eyed analysis but moderate in tone and posture. It should be guided by what international relations theorists call “defensive realism.” While depicting vividly and without hesitation a world in crisis, the NPR should argue that a return to a classical nuclear deterrence posture is the most effective strategy for the United States. 

In the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021, Mariana Budjeryn writes about the Chernobyl disaster 35 years later, while Ali Ahmad writes about nuclear power and climate change resilience.

Creating the conditions for the CTBT to enter into force has eluded the international community for the past 25 years. Since the CTBT opened for signature in 1996, the geopolitical landscape has only deteriorated.

The world's newest security partnership is a window into how the world works—and the unpredictable places it's heading.

Despite political and legal uncertainty, the CTBTO and its member states have shown remarkable ingenuity in establishing a successful global monitoring network—the International Monitoring System (IMS)—of unprecedented scale and sophistication. The system relies on superb and still unsurpassed technical capabilities for monitoring and verifying the global nuclear test ban. Nevertheless, serious technical and political challenges to the long-term sustainability of the organization and the monitoring system are slowly emerging. Consequently, although this would be undesirable and politically costly, the international community should consider taking steps to decouple the IMS from the treaty’s fate in order to maintain and expand on the extraordinary technical investments that the monitoring system represents.

The probability of terrorists getting and using a nuclear bomb appears to be low—but the consequences if they did would be so devastating that it is worth beefing up efforts to make sure terrorists never get their hands on a nuclear bomb’s essential ingredients. To see the possibilities, we need to look at motive, capability, and opportunity.

On Sept. 13, 2021, Prof. Matthew Bunn presented his work on the evolving global threat to nuclear and radiological transports to the Transport Security Unified Stakeholders Group.