Nuclear Issues

A key foreign affairs issue for the Trump administration will be its policy on Iran, as was the case also for the Obama administration. But we have no idea what approach it will take, an uncertainty amplified by the fact that Trump has no experience whatsoever in foreign policy, and no idea whose input he will accept in shaping it. It’s not as if we have no information about his attitude – during the election campaign, Trump made his intention on Iran very clear – but, as with other topics, it is unclear how he will act when once he is forced to translate his intentions into action and realizes that reality is far more complicated than he imagined.

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.

RSIS Distinguished Public Lecture by Dr Olli Heinonen, S. Rajaratnam Professor of Strategic Studies, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,
on 2 November 2016.

Hui Zhang presented "Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in China" at the 15th PIIC Beijing Seminar on International Security: Nuclear Nonproliferation and Cooperation.

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.