Nuclear Issues

President Donald Trump travels this week to Vietnam, where preparations are underway for his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But while he declared today that the summit would be “tremendous,” the meeting comes in the wake of last year’s meeting, after which Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates directly disagreed with the Trump’s exuberant claims that the North Korean threat had largely been erased. So if Trump and his own foreign policy team can't even agree on the problem, are we really right around the corner from a deal with North Korea?

Jim Braude was joined by former undersecretary of state and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

It's been six months since President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said they came to an agreement on denuclearization, but new satellite images published this week by an independent Washington think tank showed at least 13 previously undeclared missile operating bases in North Korea.

The authors analyze the Trump administration's threat to withdraw the United States from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty from historical, strategic, and legal perspectives.

In a "policy memo" to President-elect Donald Trump, Graham Allison and Dimitri K. Simes write: "The two Chinese characters that make up the word “crisis” can be interpreted as meaning both “danger” and “opportunity.” Russia today offers your administration not only a serious challenge but a significant opportunity.

Russia is no longer the Evil Empire the United States confronted over decades of Cold War. Nonetheless, Russia remains a player whose choices affect vital U.S. interests profoundly across the agenda of global issues. First and foremost, Russia remains the only nation that can erase the United States from the map in thirty minutes.

With the upcoming implementation of the Iran deal, the continuing challenge from nuclear rogue North Korea, and global competition heating up to supply nuclear facilities to new adopters of nuclear power in Asia, Europe, and Africa, American leadership in nuclear technology is more important than ever to protect our national security and maintain the highest degree of vigilance against the spread of nuclear weapons.

Over a public career that spans six decades, and now in his 93rd year, Henry Kissinger has been cautious about offering presidents advice in public.  But the outline of what he would say if Obama asked him about Russia is clear in the interview he gave to Jacob Heilbrunn in The National Interest’s latest issue. Drawing on decades of experience with successive Russian leaders during the Cold War, as well as many hours of quality face time with Putin, Kissinger’s views about how the United States should manage its relationship with Russia could hardly differ more from the bipartisan Washington consensus and Obama administration policy.

The political circus surrounding the Iran nuclear deal shouldn’t obscure the fact that President Obama won an enormous victory in negotiating the agreement and mustering the necessary congressional votes to sustain it. It’s the most determined, strategic success of his presidency.

"..."[I]t is time for the Prime Minister to come to his senses and to understand that a small country, whose very existence depends today on the United States, cannot physically block a major presidential initiative. Instead, he would be wise to work with the American administration to close gaps in the agreement, maintain close intelligence supervision of Iran's observance of the agreement, and even to take advantage of this moment to try and reach an historic defense treaty with the United States."

In the debate about whether the Iranian nuclear agreement provides Iran a “path to a bomb” or instead provides us a “window to a target,” Americans should listen carefully to the Israeli who knows best.

In his campaign to persuade Congress to reject this deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has focused like a laser beam on the claim that this agreement “paves Iran’s path to a bomb” because its key constraints expire in a decade. In contrast, one of Israel’s most respected national security barons, Amos Yadlin, formerly chief of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate under Netanyahu, has pointed out that when the agreement expires, an American or Israeli military attack will not be more difficult, and indeed could be easier than it is today.

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out