Nuclear Issues

42 Items

President Joe Biden delivers a speech on voting rights

AP/Evan Vucci

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Could the United States Still Lead the World if It Wanted to?

| July 15, 2021

Stephen Walt asks whether the United States is a good model for other liberal states and whether its policy judgments are ones that others should trust and follow, especially with respect to foreign policy.  He argues that—on balance—the answer to both questions is "no."

South Korean army's K-55 self-propelled artillery vehicle is unloaded from a barge during a Combined Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore exercise of U.S. and South Korea Combined Forces Command at the Anmyeon beach in Taean, South Korea, Monday, July 6, 2015. The U.S. and South Korean military joint exercise are held from June 29to July 9.

AP Photo/Lee Jin-man

Analysis & Opinions - War on the Rocks

South Korea, Conventional Capabilities, and the Future of the Korean Peninsula

    Authors:
  • Ian Bowers
  • Henrik Stålhane Hiim
| Feb. 11, 2021

South Korea's conventional counterforce and countervalue strategy is meant to hold North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, as well as its leadership, at risk independently from the United States. This strategy is often overlooked by policymakers and analysts, who are more focused on discussing Kim Jong Un’s pledges to develop new missile and nuclear capabilities and how the new administration of President Joe Biden should approach the nuclear issue. However, as we highlight in a new article in International Security, South Korea’s strategy increasingly has a determining impact on strategic stability on the Korean Peninsula and on prospects for denuclearization.

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry delivers a speech during the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. September 18, 2017 (Ronald Zak/Associated Press).

Ronald Zak/Associated Press

Analysis & Opinions - The National Interest

A Poorly Negotiated Saudi Nuclear Deal Could Damage Future Regional Relationships

| Feb. 05, 2018

As George Orwell once observed, some ideas are so absurd that only the intelligentsia could hold them; ordinary people would not be so foolish. A case in point is a reported proposal to allow the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium and reprocess spent reactor fuel—two activities that could bring it within weeks of acquiring nuclear weapons—under a developing civil nuclear cooperation agreement.

The fireball of a hydrogen bomb lights the Pacific sky a few seconds after the bomb was released over Bikini Atoll on May 21, 1956. (File Photo, AP)

AP

Analysis & Opinions - MIT Technology Review

What I Learned from the People who Built the Atom Bomb

| Nov. 27, 2017

When I began my career in elementary particle physics, the great figures who taught and inspired me had been part of the Manhattan Project generation that developed the atomic bomb. They were proud to have created a “disruptive” technology that ended World War II and deterred a third world war through more than 50 years of tense East-West standoff. They were also proud to have made nuclear power possible. But their understanding of the underlying technology also gave them a deep regard for the awesome, unavoidable risks that came with those technologies.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sits in the official endorsement ceremony of President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran, Iran,

AP/IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER OFFICE

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Tearing Up the Nuke Deal Now Would Hand Iran the Best of All Possible Worlds

| July 31, 2017

The Iran nuclear deal is deeply flawed. Its duration is too short, and it fails to require of Tehran the universally agreed-upon minimum for effective verification — a complete and correct declaration of all relevant activities. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake for President Donald Trump to renounce it now, as he is reportedly contemplating.