Nuclear Issues

Air Vice Marshall (Ret.) of the Indian Air Force and Fellow at Harvard's Asia Institute, Dr. Arjun Subramaniam spoke at the Future of Diplomacy Project with its Faculty Director, Nicholas Burns about the intricacies of the India-China relationship.

Nuclear energy powerhouse Westinghouse Electric Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 29 March, with its parent company Toshiba writing off more than $6 billion in losses connected to its US businesses. Westinghouse was engaged in negotiations to build six AP1000 nuclear reactors in India as part of the landmark US-India civilian nuclear agreement. The bankruptcy filing raises fresh questions, not just about the fate of the reactors, but also about the future of the nuclear deal.

Matthew Bunn, Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Principal Investigator at the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom, sits down with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) to talk about everything nuclear—from the nuclear football to the best way to prevent nuclear smuggling.

Are nuclear sites secure?  There are some who might assume the answer is yes and that we should not worry about the possibility of nuclear bomb material being stolen. Yet, recent history has repeatedly demonstrated that high security facilities thought to be secure were actually vulnerable. Two such incidents last month illustrated this idea.

More than a decade after its nuclear security recommendations first recognized the threat insiders pose to nuclear facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has finally released its guide on nuclear material control and accounting for nuclear security.  (This has been in the works for years.) Many people wrongly think that any material under international safeguards has accounting and control good enough for security purposes as well, but there are important differences.

Matthew Bunn, William Tobey, and I have a new op-ed in The Hill’s Congress Blog, “Don’t weaken our defenses against nuclear smuggling.” We wrote it in response to proposed legislation that would prohibit funding for fixed radiation detectors to catch nuclear smugglers – both for installing new ones and even for maintaining the ones U.S. taxpayers have already paid billions to install.

In The Hague, leaders have agreed on a new initiative to secure dangerous radiological sources that might be used in a so-called “dirty bomb” – to prevent incidents like the December 2013 theft of a truck carrying a deadly source in Mexico.

The Obama administration is proposing to boost Department of Energy nonproliferation funding to $1.94 billion—more than a $300 million increase from what Congress appropriated last year—in fiscal year 2016. But this is an increase over the very low fiscal year 2015 budget proposed by the administration and then further cut by Congress. Both Congress and the Russian government have cut back on further U.S.-funded nuclear security work in Russia, and the Obama administration has yet to develop major new initiatives that could absorb those resources.