Nuclear Issues

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian recounts his 544 days in an Iranian prison during a talk with R. Nicholas Burns of the Harvard Kennedy School.

A interview conducted by The Fletcher School Forum with Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Over the past two decades, the United States has increasingly turned to targeted sanctions and export restrictions, such as those imposed against Iran and North Korea, in order to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction. One vexing problem, however, is how to contend with jurisdictional hurdles when the violations occur overseas, in countries that are unable or unwilling to assist US enforcement efforts. To solve this problem, US prosecutors are turning to strategies with significant extraterritorial implications—that is, exercising legal authority beyond national borders. One such tool is to use civil legal procedures to seize assets linked to sanctions or export-control violations in jurisdictions that lack cooperative arrangements with US enforcement agencies. While this may be an attractive strategy to bolster enforcement efforts against overseas illicit procurement, using such tools is not without consequence. This article explores the political, legal, and technical implications of enforcing extraterritorial controls against overseas non-state actors by exploring the recent uses of civil-asset forfeiture against Iranian and North Korean procurement networks.

With U.S.-North Korea tensions heightened after weeks of fiery and furious rhetoric from President Trump and Kim Jong-un—pushing the world closer to nuclear conflict than it has been in decades—it’s worth taking a breath to consider what forces have kept the world’s nuclear-armed states from irradiating and annihilating each other in a shower of bombs.

Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino conducted a clever survey experiment to test Americans’ attitudes on the use of nuclear weapons. They summarize their findings in the current issue of International Security.

Americans are disturbingly unbothered by the idea of striking first with nuclear weapons.

According to a study published last week in International Security, a preeminent academic journal of international affairs, the strength of the nuclear taboo in America has been wildly overestimated. 

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.