Nuclear Issues

John S. Park, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Project on Managing the Atom Associate, argues that cooperation between North Korea and Iran has been a critical—yet underexamined—enabler of North Korea's recent success. He concludes that the time has come for the United States to view the two previously independent missile programs as two sides of the same coin and recommends strategies for disrupting the procurement channels between Iran and North Korea.

For several years, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) has been unable to reach a consensus on the adoption of revised guidelines for its members. The most contentious issue is how to strengthen restraints on the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing (E&R) technologies in a manner that would be acceptable to all NSG members, and credible to the major exporting states and the nuclear industry. This issue will be back on the agenda this month when the NSG meets in plenary session.

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.

Russia, the United States, and other countries must cooperate to enable large-scale growth of nuclear energy around the world while achieving even higher standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation than are in place today. This will require building a new global framework for nuclear energy, including new or strengthened global institutions. The Belfer Center's Managing the Atom (MTA) Project and the Russian Research Center's Kurchatov Institute developed these and additional recommendations in a new collaborative report, published in October.

Australia and other countries should redouble their efforts to fix serious gaps in an international arrangement to stop maritime shipments of materials destined for weapons of mass destruction programs, according to the Brief. It argues that heightened concerns over North Korea provide an opportunity to bolster the Proliferation Security Initiative, a 95-country arrangement to promote interception of transfers of cargoes related to weapons of mass destruction.