Nuclear Issues

Leading up to and during the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, Belfer Center experts released reports, published commentary, and provided insight and analysis into global nuclear security. In advance of the Summit, the Project on Managing the Atom set the stage for discussion with the report Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?

An in-progress compilation of the expert commentary and analysis is available here.

On October 21, 2014, Trevor Findlay, senior research fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom, chaired a session of the International Atomic Energy Agency's quadrennial Symposium on International Safeguards held at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. In addition to chairing the session on "Performance Management in Non-profit Organizations," he also presented a paper with a powerpoint slides on IAEA nuclear safeguards culture, "IAEA Safeguards Culture: 'Candy Concept' or Powerful Prism?"

"The P5+1 should set aside the effort to craft an all-at-once comprehensive bargain and instead adopt a strategy of negotiating incremental agreements. An incremental approach has a number of advantages. The negotiators could focus on one sticking point at a time, without having to coordinate agreement on all of them at once. Negotiators could defer currently intractable issues, like enrichment capacity, until greater trust is built or new opportunities arise. Most importantly, the compromises already achieved under the JPA could be maintained and consolidated, independently of the ups and downs of ongoing negotiations."

Trevor Findlay, senior research fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom, presented a paper at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s Symposium on International Safeguards in Vienna. The paper was on IAEA nuclear safeguards culture.

"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."