Nuclear Issues

David Manning, former UK Ambassador to the US, spoke widely on his thoughts on many of the pressing issues that are facing international diplomats in the coming decade in a November 26th, 2012, lecture to Harvard Kennedy School students and faculty.

According to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, currently a Fischer Family Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project, “Any presidential election is in part a referendum on the 3 a.m. question: Whom do you trust to answer and make a wise decision if the red phone rings in the middle of the night with a nuclear crisis? The remaining weeks of this presidential campaign will focus more on the foreign policy issues that will help Americans make this decision. And it should help concentrate our minds that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the most dangerous moment in modern American history, the Cuban missile crisis.”

The Summer 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features analysis and advice by Belfer Center scholars regarding the historic upheavals in the Middle East and the disastrous consequences of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The Center’s new Geopolitics of Energy project is also highlighted, along with efforts by the Project on Managing the Atom to strengthen nuclear export rules.

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

The Winter 2010/11 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights a major Belfer Center conference on technology and governance, the Center's involvement in the nuclear threat documentary Countdown to Zero, and a celebration of Belfer Center founder Paul Doty.

"The Nobel Peace Prize Committee cited Obama's dedication to arms control and nonproliferation when announcing last Friday his selection as this year's laureate. If he creates a positive, mutually reinforcing dynamic in the way he presents and sequences the two treaties [NPT and CTBT], it will give momentum and coherence to follow-on negotiations and the agreements that they produce."

As Americans learned all too dramatically on 9/11 and again during the financial crisis this autumn, we inhabit a rapidly integrating planet where dangers can strike at any time and from great distances. And when others -- China, India, Brazil -- are rising to share power in the world with us, America needs to spend more time, not less, talking and listening to friends and foes alike.