Nuclear Issues

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un trading threats with words like “fire and fury”; Pakistan deploying tactical nuclear weapons to counter Indian conventional threats; Russia enunciating an Orwellian doctrine of “escalate-to-de-escalate” that calls for early use of battlefield nuclear weapons; and major nuclear-weapons states modernizing their arsenals — nukes are back. The cruel irony: This is happening after eight years of a president who won the Nobel Peace Prize largely for his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Policymakers have long focused on preventing nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling technology. Even developing countries, however, may now possess the technical ability to create nuclear weapons. The history of gas centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective. To reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, policymakers will have look toward the cultural, normative, and political organization of the world.

"...[A] primary goal in the next decades must be to remove this risk of near global self-destruction by drastically reducing nuclear forces to a level where this outcome is not possible, but where a deterrent value is preserved — in other words, to a level of minimum deterrence. This conception was widely discussed in the early years of the nuclear era, but it drowned in the Cold War flood of weaponry. No matter how remote the risk of civilization collapse may seem now — despite its being so vivid only a few decades ago — the elimination of this risk, for this century and centuries to come, must be a primary driver for radical reductions in nuclear weapons."

"William Langewiesche has the reputation of being one of America's best investigative reporters. Unfortunately, he has written a very bad book on nuclear proliferation." Matthew Bunn reviews The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, by William Langewiesche.

"...how can the United States maximize the benefits that primacy brings and minimize the resistance that its power sometimes provokes?"

Op-ed by Dr. Ashton B. Carter and Dr. Graham T. Allison in The Washington Post

"As France greeted the fifteenth year of the nuclear age with the explosion of her first atomic bomb, the nuclear club expanded for the first time in nearly eight years. Without international agreements or a display of national self-control uncommon to these times, admissions will come with much greater frequency. Today the smaller powers, the twenty-odd nations that by their own efforts could gain admittance to the club within another eight years, await their inevitable rendezvous with Mephistopheles," wrote Paul Doty, founder of the Belfer Center, about the prospects of the expansion of the worlds most exclusive club, that of the nuclear powers.

Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall on U.S. Alliances in the Joint Forces Quarterly