Science, Technology, and Public Policy

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important cooperative framework that increasingly affects the global economy, trade, and emission patterns. However, most existing studies pay insufficient attention to consumption-based emissions, embodied emissions, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs). This study constructs a GHG emissions database to study the trends and variations in production-based, consumption-based, and embodied emissions associated with BRI countries

Chernobyl’s effects went well beyond radiation, rippling through the social and political fabric of a deteriorating society. Chernobyl helped to bring down the Soviet Union and constrained independent Ukraine’s nuclear options. It still reverberates today on the front lines of the war in eastern Ukraine and in Moscow’s denials that it is involved in undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

The United States and Iran have engaged in a constant raising of the stakes as a means of securing leverage ahead of possible nuclear negotiations. This is a classic bargaining pattern but in the current context, such an approach is particularly risky due to the potential for misperceptions. The complexities of domestic and regional dynamics are also a factor. In such a situation, absent clear understanding of the other’s motivations and tactics, raising the stakes—rather than securing leverage for effective negotiations—could steer the United States and Iran towards a path toward war.

Although Trump did not outline his legal basis for imposing the tariffs, several analysts anticipated that he was seeking to use the authorities granted him under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—the legal basis that presidents rely on to impose financial and economic sanctions against WMD proliferators, terrorist organizations, narco-traffickers, and human rights abusers. Mixing trade and immigration policy under the guise of a national security threat, however, may end up deflating Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaigns against Iran and North Korea.

Sen. Richard Lugar—with his legislative partner, Sen. Sam Nunn—imagined the unimaginable. He championed a program to provide assistance to military forces in the former Soviet republics holding tens of thousands of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons aimed at the United States and our allies, shortly after America’s existential enemy, the Soviet Union, expired. All told, the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction program provided more than $14 billion to, among other things, deactivate 13,300 nuclear warheads, eliminate 1,473 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and destroy almost 40,000 metric tons of chemical agents. The US departments of Defense and Energy also worked with Russia to improve security at 148 sites still holding nuclear weapons or weapons-grade material from Murmansk to Kamchatka.

Foreign policy pundits have bemoaned the unraveling of the post-World War II international order in recent years, describing threats to the multilateralism and liberalism enshrined in postwar institutions. An often overlooked component of that structure is the global nuclear order, which, like other parts of the postwar system, was created for magnanimous and selfish aims: reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons for all and serving the interests of the world’s most powerful states.