Nuclear Issues

On February 17, the Belfer Center co-convened the inaugural round of the “Trilateral Dialogue: Opportunities and Challenges for U.S.-China-Korea Cooperation” in Seoul, South Korea.

The Spring 2014 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 and increasing collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance around critical issues related to China. We announce former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a new Belfer Center senior fellow who will lead efforts to explore possibilities and impacts of a new strategic China-U.S. relationship. Read about this and much more.

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.

Russia, the United States, and other countries must cooperate to enable large-scale growth of nuclear energy around the world while achieving even higher standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation than are in place today. This will require building a new global framework for nuclear energy, including new or strengthened global institutions. The Belfer Center's Managing the Atom (MTA) Project and the Russian Research Center's Kurchatov Institute developed these and additional recommendations in a new collaborative report, published in October.

"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."

While United Nations reform efforts have been at the forefront of the news in recent months, reform activity has been underway within the U.N. for several years. The Belfer Center has been contributing its expertise to the reform debate on several fronts.

International Security is America's leading journal of security affairs. It provides sophisticated analyses of contemporary security issues and discusses their conceptual and historical foundations. The journal is edited at BCSIA and published quarterly by the MIT Press.