Nuclear Issues

Most histories of post-1945 U.S. grand strategy focus on containment of the Soviet Union and U.S. efforts to promote political and economic liberalization. A closer look reveals that "strategies of inhibition"—attempts to control nuclear proliferation—have been a third central pillar of U.S. grand strategy for several decades.

A prominent model of nuclear proliferation posits that a powerful patron state can prevent a weaker ally from proliferating by providing it with security guarantees. The history of West Germany's pursuit of the bomb from 1954 to 1969 suggests that a patron may also need to threaten the client state with military abandonment to convince it not to acquire nuclear weapons.

On February 16, 2015, Professor of Practice Matthew Bunn presented "The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: Next Steps" for the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations.

Pakistan has developed tactical nuclear weapons to deter India from executing its Cold Start war doctrine. India, however, has disavowed that doctrine. Further, the use of such weapons against Indian troops inside Pakistan would kill and injure countless civilians, while risking massive nuclear retaliation by India. In this International Security article, Jaganath Sankaran argues Pakistan should reconsider the role of tactical nuclear weapons in its military strategy.

"if both the top-down and bottom-up methods of trust building are never going to be risk free, is there a more plausible third option? For example, what if Washington and Beijing forget about trust-building and instead opt for a relationship based on mutual deterrence? Unfortunately, the risks of this option — arms racing, a return to a Cold War-like MAD doctrine, and forever teetering on the brink of conventional conflict — might not just upend US-China relations, they might sabotage regional and global security as well."

At 6:00 PM on October 3, 2013, George Perkovich, Vice President for Studies and
Director of the Nuclear Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave the 2013 Robert McNamara Lecture on War and Peace, titled "Preventing Nuclear War in South Asia: Unprecedented Challenges, Unprecedented Solutions."

Last October, at the foot of a rocky hillside near here, at a spot known as Degelen Mountain, several dozen Kazakh, Russian and American nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony. The modest ribbon-cutting marked the conclusion of one of the largest and most complex nuclear security operations since the Cold War — to secure plutonium (enough to build a dozen or more nuclear weapons) that Soviet authorities had buried at the testing site years before and forgotten, leaving it vulnerable to terrorists and rogue states. The effort spanned 17 years, cost $150 million and involved a complex mix of intelligence, science, engineering, politics and sleuthing. This op-ed is based on documents and interviews with Kazakh, Russian and U.S. participants, and reveals the scope of the operation for the first time.

Ayman Khalil asked whether the effort to create a WMD-free zone in the Middle East is dead. Martin's answer is this: The effort will continue, but the opportunity presented by the 2010 Review Conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) may be slipping out of reach.