Nuclear Issues

This week in Say More, Project Syndicate talks with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, and the author, most recently, of A Life in the American Century.

Joseph Nye writes that even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons— some old, some new— that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

It seems unlikely that Russia will again possess the resources to balance U.S. power in the same way that the Soviet Union did during the four decades after World War II. But declining powers merit as much diplomatic attention as rising ones do. Joseph S. Nye worries that the United States lacks a strategy to prevent Russia from becoming an international spoiler.

On June 3, 2010, current and former members of Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, gathered at Harvard's Eliot House to celebrate PAUL DOTY's 90th birthday. This event, which followed Harvard's 2010 Paul Doty Lecture, included numerous stories and praise for Doty, who founded what is now the Belfer Center and the Molecular and Cellular Biology department. (This is a transcript of the comments at the shevent.)

"It is now incontrovertibly clear that the Bush Administration seriously miscalculated the costs and benefits associated with its invasion of Iraq...."