Nuclear Issues

On 24 and 25 November 2016 experts from politics and academia, including FDP Executive director Cathryn Clüver, discussed the impact of Brexit on several policy areas in a series of workshops at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. All events took place under Chatham House rules.

In a Harvard Kennedy School IDEASpHERE session titled "Challenges to US Global Leadership," Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, David Gergen, David Ignatius, and Meghan O’Sullivan discussed challenges as well as opportunities facing the United States. Burns moderated the session.

Challenges include the rise of China and the future of the U.S.-China relationship, the crises taking place around the world, and the reputation of the U.S. worldwide. An unexpected opportunity is the increase in available energy sources in the United States.

The last seven decades without war among the great powers – what historians describe as “the long peace” – is a remarkable achievement. “This is a rare and unusual fact if you look at the last few thousand years of history,” said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center and moderator of the IDEASpHERE panel “Winning the Peace.” “Furthermore, it is no accident. Wise choices by statesmen have contributed to ‘the long peace,’ which has allowed many generations to live their lives.”

When do states attack or consider attacking nuclear infrastructure in nonnuclear weapons states? Despite the importance of this question, relatively few scholarly articles have attempted to identify the factors that lead a state to attack another state's nuclear facilities. This paper conducts the first large-n analysis on when states use force as a way to control proliferation.

This paper challenges existing arguments that states are deterred from attacking nuclear programs by the prospect of a military retaliation from the proliferating state or concerns about international condemnation. Instead, it finds that states are more likely to attack nuclear programs when they believe that the proliferating state might use nuclear weapons or engage in other offensive behavior. States are willing to accept substantial costs in attacking if they believe that a particular country's acquisition of nuclear weapons poses a significant threat to their security.

Nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, has the government adequately protected its citizens against terrorism and catastrophic disaster?

A paper by the National Security Advisory Group

Conference Report on the challenges of preventive diplomacy and preventive defense in South Asia.

Occasional Paper from the Center for Science and International Affairs

Book by Ashton Carter, Desmond Ball, Hans Bethe, Bruce Blair, Paul Bracken, Hillman Dickinson, Richard Garwin, Kurt Gottfried, David Holloway, Henry Kendall, Lloyd Leavitt, Jr., Richard Ned Debow, Condoleezza Rice, Peter Stein, John Steinbruner, Lucja Swiatkowski, and Paul Tomb.