Nuclear Issues

The authors write that Vietnam will play host to a critical meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, and it will benefit from their peace efforts regardless of the outcome.

Kim Jong Un's reported offer to extend the current freeze on nuclear and missile tests as a basis for beginning denuclearization negotiations with the United States is an opportunity not to be missed. Whether the opening produces significant progress toward North Korea's denuclearization or merely a lull in its activities is uncertain. To take full advantage of the opportunity, President Trump should appoint a senior envoy to represent him in the talks, backed by a strong interagency team.

Matthew Bunn is a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and co-principal investigator for the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom. Bunn’s research focus is on nuclear theft terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and innovation in energy technology. During the Clinton administration, Bunn served as an advisor to the White House Office of Science Technology Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the United States and the former Soviet Union. We asked Bunn about the current crisis in U.S.-Russian relations and its impact on nuclear security.

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.

"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.