Nuclear Issues

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian recounts his 544 days in an Iranian prison during a talk with R. Nicholas Burns of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

The Belfer Center’s Iran Project and the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) co-sponsored a luncheon panel on the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the scenarios for the potential breakdown of current international talks on Iran, entitled “And Then What? Imagining the Middle East if Nuclear Negotiations with Iran Fail.”

Belfer Center at IDEASpHERE 2014

Incisive questions and ambitious answers marked Harvard Kennedy School’s IDEASpHERE celebration in late spring. Belfer Center thinkers shared their big ideas in more than a dozen sessions, ranging from China's rise to nuclear weapons.

Below is a sampling of notable thoughts from those sessions. For more, including summaries and video highlights, see belfercenter.org/ideasphere2014.

The Winter 2011-2012 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features news, analysis and insight by Belfer Center scholars on issues that include increasingly important info-tech policy challenges and the first U.S.-Russian joint threat assessment on nuclear terrorism. The Center’s deepening impact on defense policy is highlighted with an article about the recent appointments of Ashton B. Carter and Eric Rosenbach to senior Pentagon posts and a Q&A with Carter, the new deputy secretary of defense. Additional articles focus on issues ranging from the Palestinian bid for statehood to Calestous Juma’s role in Lagos’ launch of the first innovation advisory council in Africa.

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

"The purpose of the exercise was to illuminate the possible evolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis over the next year based on policy choices made by concerned countries.... Several participants offered their takeaways from the exercise."

"I summarized my own takeaway from the Iran simulation in a poor-man's version of Yogi Berra: if the river is pushing your raft to where you don't want to go, if you just hang on, you'll get there. My second: if you don't want to go where the river is pushing your raft, you better get off."

Research Fellow Kayhan Barzegar describes the four candidates for the Iranian presidency (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezai) in terms of their credentials, power base, and stances on domestic politics and foreign policy—including the Iranian nuclear program.