Nuclear Issues

This week in Say More, Project Syndicate talks with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, and the author, most recently, of A Life in the American Century.

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

Joseph Nye considers U.S. options for risk reductions as nuclear threats escalate and China-Taiwan tensions rise.

 Stephen Walt decided to look back to see if 2022 had gone according to his expectations. In his last column of 2021, he had described "Biden’s 2022 Foreign-Policy To-Do List." What did he get right, what did he get wrong, and how well did the Biden administration perform?

Joseph Nye writes that Russian aggression and nuclear saber rattling have reminded us that the likelihood of nuclear war is a matter of both independent and interdependent probabilities. Paradoxically, reducing the probability of an all-out catastrophe requires that we learn to accept a certain degree of risk and uncertainty.

Joseph Nye posits that the real lesson from Russia's war in Ukraine is that the international community must reinforce the existing NPT and refrain from actions that erode it.

Joseph Nye writes that even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons— some old, some new— that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

Stephen Walt argues that the ultimate goal should be conflict resolution in Ukraine—not just an end to the fighting but a political arrangement that makes a resumption of war later on less likely.

Stephen Walt offers a tentative and far-from-comprehensive survey of what scholars have to say about the war in Ukraine.

Russia's war in Ukraine has brought questions of nuclear deterrence back to the fore, reminding world leaders that risk reduction must remain a top item on the global agenda. Because political and technological change will always introduce new issues, the work of maintaining a "just deterrence" is never done.