Nuclear Issues

880 Items

U.S. and UK flags

Alex Brandon | AP

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Forging a Democratic Decision Advantage

| October 2023

2023 marked eighty years since the wartime adoption of the BRUSA Agreement between Great Britain and the United States. This 1943 document codified the growing relationship between
U.S. and U.K. signals intelligence organizations and included policies governing the exchange of personnel and joint regulations for handling sensitive material. Security directives and protocols aligned operational processes between the democratic governments, setting new cooperative standards for nation-states battling authoritarian regimes. 

A photo of Kyiv

Eugene | Unsplash

Analysis & Opinions - The Cipher Brief

Ukraine’s Big ‘Adventure Capital’ Opportunity

| Oct. 16, 2023

Early after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Russian troops threatened Kyiv and Russian cruise missiles destroyed targets across the country, Oleksandr Kamyshin, Head of Ukrainian State Railways, received direct customer feedback that the bathrooms at one of his stations were filthy.

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.

Wreaths are placed at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

AP/Susan Walsh, POOL

Analysis & Opinions - International Affairs Blog

Nuclear Policy at the G7: Six Key Questions

    Authors:
  • Alicia Sanders-Zakre
  • James Wirtz
  • Sidra Hamidi
  • Carolina Panico
  • Anne Sisson Runyan
| May 17, 2023

This year's G7 summit in Hiroshima sees nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation sitting high on the agenda, amid rising tensions between the nuclear states and an increasingly divided international order.  Six contributors offer their analyses, including the Belfer Center's Mayumi Fukushima.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and U.S. President Richard Nixon

AP/Henry Burroughs

Journal Article - International Theory

Conceptualizing Interstate Cooperation

| 2023

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). The authors argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this article, the authors develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR.

Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

Consider These 4 Inconvenient Questions as the Ukraine War Moves Forward

| Feb. 22, 2023

Most public discussion this winter reflects a conviction that Ukraine must — and can — win a decisive victory. But what constitutes a win against a country such as Russia? As we consider the road ahead, we cannot escape the brute fact that Putin commands an arsenal of roughly 6,000 nuclear weapons that could kill us all.

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

A Report Card on the War in Ukraine

| Feb. 22, 2023

By now, it is clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been a grave strategic error. As Napoleon Bonaparte’s former minister of police said of the French leader’s foolish execution of a rival duke, his actions could be described as “worse than a crime … a blunder.” Yet even as Putin’s war has undermined Russia on the geopolitical stage, we should not overlook the fact that Russia has succeeded in severely weakening Ukraine on the ground.