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.

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.

Ayman Khalil asked whether the effort to create a WMD-free zone in the Middle East is dead. Martin's answer is this: The effort will continue, but the opportunity presented by the 2010 Review Conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) may be slipping out of reach.