Nuclear Issues

The probability of terrorists getting and using a nuclear bomb appears to be low—but the consequences if they did would be so devastating that it is worth beefing up efforts to make sure terrorists never get their hands on a nuclear bomb’s essential ingredients. To see the possibilities, we need to look at motive, capability, and opportunity.

What sounded so simple during last year’s presidential campaign has turned out, like everything related to Iran, to be quite complicated.

The first 100 days are key to understanding where any presidency is going. Now more than a third of the way into that timeframe, how is President Joe Biden doing in the international policy arena? The World’s host Marco Werman speaks with Nicholas Burns, a former US under secretary of state for political affairs and a former ambassador to NATO.

Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes join Andrea Mitchell to talk about Biden's next steps on Iran and Russia. Burns says that Biden's "speech today at the Munich Security Conference has put the United States squarely back on center stage globally."

Jayita Sarkar explains why the Biden administration needs to re-conceptualize nuclear terrorism and act quickly.

Despite the continuing debate in Tehran, the principle of “no negotiation under pressure” with the United States remains a consensual principle among all members of the current regime. The Supreme Leader has expressed this position by stating that the negotiations with the Trump administration are “double poison”. While Iran’s regional enemies are pushing for confrontation, the international community remains supportive of Tehran’s political position, as long as it stays committed to the nuclear deal. Existing indicators do not point at any willingness for confrontation from either side – at least at the moment. And although some regional actors have attempted to pacify the tension, the prospects for a truce remain unlikely within the current context.

The following is a selection of military-political lessons gleaned mostly from the recollections of Soviet strategists who were involved in making and executing the fateful decision to send troops to Afghanistan, as well as from writings by some of post-Soviet Russia’s prominent military analysts. Where possible, the author made an effort to relay these strategists’ analysis of the failures and successes of the intervention because he felt that such assessments, based on first-hand experience, are not always given their due in English-language literature on the subject.