Nuclear Issues

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."

The Right Honourable Douglas Alexander offered his views on European security in a discussion moderated by FDP Executive Director Cathryn Cluver.

Jens Stoltenberg,NATO Secretary General, discussed the future of the NATO alliance during this speech, given at the Harvard Kennedy School on September 23, 2016. He described the alliance as a responsive organization, capable of adapting to changes in the international security landscape but committed to the continuity of its founding values. In particular, he emphasized the necessity of maintaining a policy of absolute solidarity among member states, especially  in light of the exacerbating civil war in Syria and Russia’s aggressive stance toward countries to the East of NATO member state borders.

The Spring 2014 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 edition highlights the Belfer Center’s deepening engagement with China and increasing collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance around critical issues related to China. We announce former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a new Belfer Center senior fellow who will lead efforts to explore possibilities and impacts of a new strategic China-U.S. relationship. Read about this and much more.

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 Summer 2010 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 involvement with the Nuclear Security Summit, which was organized by Center alumni Gary Samore and Laura Holgate.

The Winter 2008-09 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming research, activities, and analysis by Center faculty, fellows, and staff on critical global issues. "What should the next president do first?" is a question raised in this issue. Belfer Center experts respond to the question with advice on what they consider priority issues of national security, climate/energy policy, and the economic crisis.

The Winter 2008-09 issue also features take-aways from the Center’s recent “Acting in Time on Energy Policy” conference hosted by the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group. In addition, it spotlights Belfer Center Faculty Affiliate Richard Clarkeand new Kennedy School Professor Nicholas Burns.

Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader’s national identity conception in determining a state’s nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.

"Globalization has the effect of incapacitating states as autonomous units."