Nuclear Issues

189 Items

Visitors tour past military vehicles carrying the Dong Feng 41 and DF-17 ballistic missiles at an exhibition highlighting President Xi Jining and his China's achievements under his leadership, at the Beijing Exhibition Hall in Beijing on Oct. 12, 2022.

AP Photo/Andy Wong

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

China’s Misunderstood Nuclear Expansion: How U.S. Strategy Is Fueling Beijing’s Growing Arsenal

    Authors:
  • M. Taylor Fravel
  • Henrik Stålhane Hiim
  • Magnus Langset Trøan
| Nov. 10, 2023

Among the many issues surrounding China’s ongoing military modernization, perhaps none has been more dramatic than its nuclear weapons program. For decades, the Chinese government was content to maintain a comparatively small nuclear force. As recently as 2020, China’s arsenal was little changed from previous decades and amounted to some 220 weapons, around five to six percent of either the U.S. or Russian stockpiles of deployed and reserve warheads.

A black and white image from the film Oppenheimer showing Cillian Murray as Oppenheimer with his hat puled down over his face shielding himself from press photographers.

Universal Studios

Analysis & Opinions - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The Real-Life Events of "Oppenheimer"

| July 26, 2023

Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer is outstanding. It’s an immersive biopic, the likes of which you will be hard to find elsewhere. The acting, cinematography, and seat-thundering sound, all combine to take audiences into the mind and moral decisions of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the team of brilliant scientists at Los Alamos, who built the world’s first atomic bomb.

"Fat Man" nuclear bomb

AP, File

Analysis & Opinions - The Conversation

How the Soviets Stole Nuclear Secrets and Targeted Oppenheimer, the 'Father of the Atomic Bomb'

| July 24, 2023

Calder Walton writes that Soviet espionage inside the Manhattan Project would change history. By the end of World War II, Stalin's spies had delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Kremlin. This accelerated Moscow's bomb project. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949, it was a replica of the weapon built at Los Alamos and dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki.

from left, Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Nuclear Security Administration director Jill Hruby, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Arati Prabhakar, the president's science adviser, and National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Marvin Adams

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Analysis & Opinions - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Fusion Breakthroughs in Context: Professors Holdren and Bunn Reflect on Fusion Ignition Announcement

| Dec. 14, 2022

The Belfer Center Communications Team reached out to policy experts John P. Holdren and Matthew Bunn to reflect on the recent achievement of fusion ignition at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

The USS Vesole, foreground, a radar picket ship, steams alongside the Soviet freighter Polzunov, outbound from Cuba, for an inspection of her cargo in the Atlantic Ocean, Nov. 11, 1962

AP Photo/Pool

Analysis & Opinions - Arms Control Today

The Cuban Missile Crisis at 60: Six Timeless Lessons for Arms Control

| October 2022

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.