Nuclear Issues

Belfer Center at IDEASpHERE 2014

Incisive questions and ambitious answers marked Harvard Kennedy School’s IDEASpHERE celebration in late spring. Belfer Center thinkers shared their big ideas in more than a dozen sessions, ranging from China's rise to nuclear weapons.

Below is a sampling of notable thoughts from those sessions. For more, including summaries and video highlights, see belfercenter.org/ideasphere2014.

The Spring 2013 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This edition highlights the Belfer Center’s deepening engagement with China.

Sponsored by the Institute for China-U.S. People-to-People Exchange and by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer and Ash Centers, the “Challenge and Cooperation” conference at Peking University in January dissected the implications of China’s new leadership and President Obama’s second term. Participants examined the roles the two countries should play in international security and in trade and investment issues.

A small sampling of Belfer Center perspectives on Iran and the country's nuclear program.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, argues that despite not falling victim to a major terrorist event in the last 10 years, the United States must not be complacent in its counter-terrorism efforts. Mowatt-Larssen said in a Belfer Center seminar in September that he believes the possibility of a major attack is higher in the next 10 years than in the preceding decade.

The Belfer Center's Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, Ashraf Hegazy, Joseph S. Nye, and Stephen Walt consider the U.S.'s shifting foreign policy in the Middle East.

The Winter 2010/11 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights a major Belfer Center conference on technology and governance, the Center's involvement in the nuclear threat documentary Countdown to Zero, and a celebration of Belfer Center founder Paul Doty.

"The purpose of the exercise was to illuminate the possible evolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis over the next year based on policy choices made by concerned countries.... Several participants offered their takeaways from the exercise."

"I summarized my own takeaway from the Iran simulation in a poor-man's version of Yogi Berra: if the river is pushing your raft to where you don't want to go, if you just hang on, you'll get there. My second: if you don't want to go where the river is pushing your raft, you better get off."