Nuclear Issues

On October 11, 2018, Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Practice Matthew Bunn presented "For Security's Sake: Saving U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

As the IAEA Director General Emeritus, Hans Blix put it “A nuclear accident anywhere is an accident everywhere”. Fukushima revealed that no one state is immune from fallacies that resulted both before and after the nuclear accident. That will be also true with any nuclear terrorism event, which we have been spared thus far.

Dr Olli Heinonen, S. Rajaratnam Professor of Strategic Studies, on 25 October 2016, in a RSIS seminar at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Jens Stoltenberg,NATO Secretary General, discussed the future of the NATO alliance during this speech, given at the Harvard Kennedy School on September 23, 2016. He described the alliance as a responsive organization, capable of adapting to changes in the international security landscape but committed to the continuity of its founding values. In particular, he emphasized the necessity of maintaining a policy of absolute solidarity among member states, especially  in light of the exacerbating civil war in Syria and Russia’s aggressive stance toward countries to the East of NATO member state borders.

Situated in a difficult neighborhood, New Delhi has laid strong emphasis on both nuclear safety and security for a couple of decades now. Almost three decades of state-sponsored terrorism and insurgencies of varying scale and proportion within India have meant that security of nuclear materials and installations has been a great worry to India’s security and atomic energy establishments. India’s concerns even predate the Western focus on WMD terrorism, which gained prominence only after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.  Unfortunately, India’s excessive caution and secrecy in the nuclear arena has led the world to assume that India does not pay much attention to this issue or that it has inadequate security, which is far from the truth.

Aaron Arnold, Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center, writes in The Hill that while Iran will soon be getting sanctions relief as the nuclear accord with the P5+1 is enacted, it has not yet taken steps to update its banking system and bring it up to international money laundering and counter-terror financing. He also suggests that in order to balance the competing political and financial concerns at play with sanctions, the international community led by the United States should make clear conditions for both exclusion and rejoining of the international financial system.

Henry Rome reviews the latest version of the Iran oversight legislation drafted by Sen. Ben Cardin (D, Maryland). Since publishing a “discussion draft” last month, Cardin removed language related to Iranian production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) but retained sections permitting new terrorism sanctions and increasing defense assistance to Israel.

Aaron Arnold, Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center, and Nikos Passas, Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, argue in The Conversation that Iran's reintegration into the global financial system may in fact make it easier, not more difficult, to monitor Iranian financial activities for illicit transactions. They point to the fact that banks can monitor transactions for entities designated as involved in terrorist or weapons of mass destruction activities by the U.S. Treasury. They also suggest that Iran may adopt stricter money laundering standards in order to increase economic integration. While challenges remain, they suggest that building a public-private partnership between banks and regulators will ensure that Iran will be caught in any illicit financial actions after the nuclear deal.

In prisons as in nuclear facilities, employees are tasked with guarding something highly dangerous in high-stress environments. Both face high costs in the event of failure, and both are especially vulnerable to complacency and insider threats. Given these parallels, two inmates’ dramatic break-out from a New York prison in early June offers nuclear security practitioners valuable insights into how to avert an equally dramatic (and potentially much more consequential) breech.