Nuclear Issues

7 Items

Vietnamese sky raider pulls out of its bomb run after a phosphorous bomb explodes

AP/Nick Ut

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

Judging Henry Kissinger

| Nov. 30, 2023

Joseph S. Nye writes that evaluating ethics in international relations is difficult, and Kissinger's legacy is particularly complex. Over his long tenure in government, he had many great successes, including with China and the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Kissinger also had major failures, including in how the Vietnam War ended. But on net, his legacy is positive. In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his decisions made the international order more stable and safer.

The USS Vesole, foreground, a radar picket ship, steams alongside the Soviet freighter Polzunov, outbound from Cuba, for an inspection of her cargo in the Atlantic Ocean, Nov. 11, 1962

AP Photo/Pool

Analysis & Opinions - Arms Control Today

The Cuban Missile Crisis at 60: Six Timeless Lessons for Arms Control

| October 2022

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro gestures with his hand while speaking to an estimated crowd of 10,000 persons at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 1959. Members of Castro's party stand behind the speaker. (AP Photo)

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Fidel Castro at Harvard: How History Might Have Changed

| April 25, 2015

FIFTY-SIX YEARS ago today, in 1959, a 32-year-old victorious revolutionary named Fidel Castro arrived at Back Bay Station to face a raucous crowd of 5,000 Bostonians.

Graham Allison writes in the Boston Globe that Castro was headed to Harvard, his last stop on a 12-day trip along the East Coast....Castro’s visit aroused so much excitement that Harvard had no auditorium large enough to host his speech. So the Harvard football stadium was converted into an amphitheater.

"The social sciences rarely allow for controlled experiments where we can test initiatives for cause and effect," Allison writes. "But occasionally the world around us offers its own clues. Is it accidental that the two states that have persisted the longest as bastions of Stalinist authoritarianism are the two that the US has most harshly isolated and sanctioned: North Korea and Cuba?"

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan celebrate the signing of a nuclear fuel swap agreement among the countries, in Tehran, on May 17, 2010.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - Center for Strategic Research

Being "Smart" with "Smart Power": Why Should Washington Accept the Tehran Nuclear Declaration?

| June 9, 2010

"...[R]ising regional powers such as Turkey and Brazil can fulfill the role of active partners and help bridge the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two sides; Iran and 5+1. These actors' perspectives on issues such as international peace and security, comprehensive global disarmament and nuclear monopolies have many supporters in the international community, especially among the Non-Aligned Movement's members, who are fed up with duplicity and self-aggrandizing policies of some of the great powers."

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Analysis & Opinions - New York Times Book Review

Review of Dino Brugioni's Eyeball to Eyeball

| February 9, 1992

Distant as it is, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 still offeres the best lens available through which to examine the possibilities of nuclear confrontation, problems of crisis management and opportunities for crisis prevention. It remains the only occasion in the postwar era when the United States and the Soviet Union stood "eyeball to eyeball" contemplating actions that could have led directly to nuclear war. Dino A. Brugioni has now made an important contribution to the growing number of books on the crisis. His is the first account of this event as seen through the eyes of the intelligence officer. He has made admirable use of his own personal experience (he was the supervisor of aerial reconnaissance photographs during the crisis), as well as the historian's craft (he is also the author of a book on the Civil War), to retell this story with special intention to the role played by intelligence.