Nuclear Issues

Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S. Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry and Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University Adil Najam discuss the ups and downs of US-Pakistan relations and possibilities for engagement under the new US administration.

In a "policy memo" to President-elect Donald Trump, Graham Allison and Dimitri K. Simes write: "The two Chinese characters that make up the word “crisis” can be interpreted as meaning both “danger” and “opportunity.” Russia today offers your administration not only a serious challenge but a significant opportunity.

Russia is no longer the Evil Empire the United States confronted over decades of Cold War. Nonetheless, Russia remains a player whose choices affect vital U.S. interests profoundly across the agenda of global issues. First and foremost, Russia remains the only nation that can erase the United States from the map in thirty minutes.

After the U.S. Presidential election, we are entering a particularly vulnerable period as militant Islamists seek to test the new American president just as al-Qaeda (AQ) tested President George W. Bush shortly after the 2000 election.

We are now 15 years into the fight against Islamic-inspired terrorism. The day after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US and its allies launched a global anti-terrorism coalition to crush AQ and its allies; a fight that many expected to last a generation. The timing was not wrong, but the nature of the threat itself was both misunderstood and underestimated.

Donald Trump is an apprentice in the nuclear world. Worse, he has no appetite for learning.

They say we are at war.

What does war look like?

Our enemy is violent Islamic extremism. He is Daesh. He is al-Qaeda. The enemy consists of all groups and adherents of violent Islamic extremism. Our enemy is the “global jihad” movement inspired by the 9/11 attack. They seek to impose an aberrant ideology on the world. For Daesh and their allies, coexistence with their enemies is unimaginable. Compromise is impossible. Daesh has adopted the mindset of an apocalyptic cult group.

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out

Characterizing the future performance of energy technologies can improve the development of energy policies that have net benefits under a broad set of future conditions. In particular, decisions about public investments in research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) that promote technological change can benefit from (1) an explicit consideration of the uncertainty inherent in the innovation process and (2) a systematic evaluation of the tradeoffs in investment allocations across different technologies. To shed light on these questions, over the past five years several groups in the United States and Europe have conducted expert elicitations and modeled the resulting societal benefits. In this paper, the authors discuss the lessons learned from the design and implementation of these initiatives.

Imagine you are an aide to President Obama, making a recommendation about what he should do to confront the toughest foreign policy crises on the agenda: whether to launch military strikes against the Syrian regime; how to minimize the damage from NSA surveillance leaks; how to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Making such hard choices has long been the core of the oversubscribed Harvard Kennedy School Course, IGA-211: “Central Challenges of American National Security, Strategy and the Press” that Graham Allison and David Sanger are teaching this fall. Harvard graduate students, playing the roles of senior White House advisers, write and then defend strategy memos on how the U.S. should act in these cases.

Now, for the first time, anyone can audit an online version of this course, called HKS211.1x. In addition, 500 successful applicants will be able to enroll and complete weekly assignments, join discussion groups, and earn a certificate of mastery if they pass. Both of these options are available for free through edX, the non-profit online education enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT.

Gary Samore, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs's Executive Director for Research, spoke on a panel entitled "Iran: Crossing the Red Line?" at the Aspen Security Forum in July of 2013.

The videotaped discussion is available here.