Nuclear Issues

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

Why do we think Vladimir Putin will not use “the bomb” when there is so much evidence that he will?

Recent quantitative scholarship uses warhead counts to examine whether nuclear superiority offers political or military benefits beyond having a secure second-strike capability. These analyses overlook other elements of a state’s nuclear capability such as state perceptions and beliefs.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

South Korea's conventional counterforce and countervalue strategy is meant to hold North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, as well as its leadership, at risk independently from the United States. This strategy is often overlooked by policymakers and analysts, who are more focused on discussing Kim Jong Un’s pledges to develop new missile and nuclear capabilities and how the new administration of President Joe Biden should approach the nuclear issue. However, as we highlight in a new article in International Security, South Korea’s strategy increasingly has a determining impact on strategic stability on the Korean Peninsula and on prospects for denuclearization.

With concerns and uncertainties regarding Iran’s nuclear future persisting to this day, this paper seeks to review the TRR negotiations and the context in which they unfolded in order to capture some of the lessons of negotiating with Iran regarding its nuclear program, primarily from the viewpoint of senior U.S. officials involved at the time. The paper is also informed by the personal perspective of one of the authors (Poneman) who led the U.S. delegation in the 2009 Vienna talks, and who, prior to this publication, had not publicly elaborated on his experience. The other author (Nowrouzzadeh), who supported the TRR talks in an analytical capacity within the U.S. Department of Defense, also conducted an extensive interview with Poneman as part of their collaboration on this paper. By drawing on existing literature and recent interviews with several senior U.S. officials involved in the negotiations now that over ten years have passed, the authors seek to draw useful lessons from this episode that can assist policymakers in understanding Iran’s nuclear decision-making and in their continued efforts to shape the future trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program.

South Korea’s conventional counterforce and countervalue strategy is a manifestation of its uncertainties over the reliability of the U.S. alliance. This strategy has significant implications for strategic stability and the potential for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.    

A comparative analysis of the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s previously underexplored radiological weapons programs identifies the drivers behind their rise and demise. The findings of this analysis illuminate the factors likely to affect the pursuit of radiological weapons by other states in the future.