Nuclear Issues

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

After viewing the movie Oppenheimer, Matthew Bunn, John P. Holdren, Mariana Budjeryn, Matthew J. Parent, Calder Walton, Sylvia Mishra, and Julie George offer their thoughts on its relevance to the world today. 

Calder Walton writes that Soviet espionage inside the Manhattan Project would change history. By the end of World War II, Stalin's spies had delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Kremlin. This accelerated Moscow's bomb project. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949, it was a replica of the weapon built at Los Alamos and dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki.

Belfer Center experts on the U.S.-China relationship and Middle East issues shared thoughts on the significance of the unexpected Iran-Saudi Arabia agreement brokered by China. 

Jayita Sarkar and Caitlin Meyer write that COVID-19 is killing Native Americans at nearly three times the rate of whites, and on the Navajo Nation itself, about 30,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus and roughly 1,000 have died. But among the Navajo (or Diné), the coronavirus is also spreading through a population that decades of unsafe uranium mining and contaminated groundwater has left sick and vulnerable.

Jayita Sarkar explains why the Biden administration needs to re-conceptualize nuclear terrorism and act quickly.

In this issue, we highlight five new books by Belfer Center members.

Calder Walton writes that autocratic regimes — China, Russia and Iran — have been using social media to try to influence U.S. public opinion. History reveals how and why a one-party regime used disinformation to salvage its reputation following a disaster — the Soviet Union's 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, whose history also reveals how such disinformation can be countered.

Nathaniel Moir reviews Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam by Ingo Trauschweizer.