Nuclear Issues

Joseph Nye writes that In the cyber realm, the same program can be used for legitimate or malicious purposes, depending on the user’s intent. But if that makes traditional arms-control treaties impossible to verify, it may still be possible to set limits on certain types of civilian targets and negotiate rough rules of the road that limit conflict.

Stephen Walt writes that getting a new nuclear deal with Iran won't be easy—but the U.S. president's utter lack of principle could help guide the way.

Stephen Walt writes an open letter to Donald Trump on how to deal with the Islamic Republic—and his own administration.

Right now, everything both sides do to strengthen their defenses looks to the other side like preparation for attack.

Although Trump did not outline his legal basis for imposing the tariffs, several analysts anticipated that he was seeking to use the authorities granted him under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal basis that presidents rely on to impose financial and economic sanctions against WMD proliferators, terrorist organizations, narco-traffickers, and human rights abusers. Mixing trade and immigration policy under the guise of a national security threat, however, may end up deflating Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaigns against Iran and North Korea.

Dina Esfandiary analyzes Iran's limited and calculated response to increased U.S. Pressure.

In the wake of National Security Advisor John Bolton's announcement that the United States had sent an air craft carrier to the Persian Gulf, Stephen Walt outlines five possibilities of what the Trump administration's objective for Iran could be.

Dina Esfandiary analyzes the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign against Iran and concludes that it seems to be designed to force Iran into leaving the JCPOA and set the scene for military confrontation.

In mid-January, a team of scholars from the Belfer Center’s Intelligence and Managing the Atom Projects traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel to examine samples of, and receive briefings on, an archive of documents related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The large cache includes some 55,000 pages of documents and a further 55,000 files on CDs that included photos and videos. A clandestine Israeli intelligence operation spirited the materials out of Iran in early 2018.

The documents that the Belfer group were shown confirm that senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003. 

This brief report summarizes the group’s conclusions about what the archive reveals about Iran’s program and questions that remain open.

The authors analyze the Trump administration's maximum pressure policy towards Iran and describe how it targets the Iranian people directly and is counterproductive for all nuclear nonproliferation objectives.