Managing the Atom

Please Note New Date.

Speakers:  Joseph S. Nye, Professor Emeritus, HKS;  Nobukatsu Kanehara, Former Assistant Chief Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister of Japan; Mayumi Fukushima, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Moderator: David Sanger, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center

The panelists will discuss how Putin's war in Ukraine may affect the security landscape of East Asia.

Everyone is welcome to join via Zoom! Please register in advance here: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqduCppz8rH90D4Go7vF_gg_0xNpdNCRDO 

A Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) seminar with Hyun-Binn Cho, postdoctoral research fellow with MTA and the International Security Program.

A Project on Managing the Atom seminar with Ariel Petrovics, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program. 

Speaker: Christopher Lawrence, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The history of U.S. engagement with North Korea offers important lessons that could help reframe the diplomatic impasse today. In the 1994 Agreed Framework (AF), the regime agreed to dismantle its plutonium-production complex in exchange for western light water reactors (LWR) and the promise of political normalization with the United States. As construction of the LWRs fell behind, however, North Korea embarked on a secret uranium enrichment program. Today, scholars and policymakers look back at the LWRs of the AF as a "carrot" — "we offered the carrot, and they cheated anyway." But when scholars and policymakers consider the unique technical attributes of LWRs and how their construction was planned to be situated within a diplomatic track to normalization, they appear to function more as a way to signal commitment than as a carrot to bribe the regime. In this light, chronic construction delays and the offset of LWR costs to U.S. allies can be interpreted as signals about America's lack of commitment to normalization with North Korea. This conceptual shift — from carrots and sticks to signaling and credibility — offers important insights into past diplomatic failures and could help reconcile the competing visions of engagement with North Korea today.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Amid a flurry of summits, Professor Yoon Young-kwan, former South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, will provide a South Korean perspective of where we’re headed with denuclearization and peace-building on the Korean Peninsula.

For many years, the United States has maintained a formal extended deterrence commitment to protect Japan that has included the possible use of nuclear weapons.  This MTA seminar will examine the history of the U.S. nuclear umbrella for Japan, the role of the umbrella plays in Japanese and U.S. security planning, and questions regarding the credibility of the commitment.

Coffee and tea provided. Please join us - Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Are there any circumstances under which China can be more transparent regarding nuclear deterrence and ambiguity? MTA fellow Han Hua will present a seminar on the implications of this questions. This seminar will also touch upon U.S. strategic posturing and China's attitude towards transparency.

Coffee and tea provided. Please join us - Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Policy-makers and analysts point to the lack of mutual trust in U.S.-China nuclear relationship as an obstacle for deep cooperation on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation issues. But what does trust mean in their nuclear relationship? Does trust matter for bilateral cooperation on nuclear issues? If so, has any trust been built during their engagement and communication with each other over the past few decades? This presentation offers a preliminary analysis of these issues.

Coffee and tea provided. Please join us - Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Under what conditions do states seriously consider and use preventive military force as a counter proliferation strategy against adversarial nuclear weapons programs? In this seminar, Ms. Whitlark will utilize the comparative case study method and conducts archival research and process tracing into six cases of American and Israeli counter-proliferation decision-making. She will argue that it is the pre-presidential or pre-prime ministerial beliefs of executives, specifically their beliefs about the general consequences of nuclear proliferation and the ability to deter the particular proliferator in question, that determine a leader’s likely counter-proliferation behavior once in office.

Coffee and tea provided. Please join us - Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

What can the U.S. do to thwart the nuclear ambitions of its allies?  Looking to the past, the U.S. was able to leverage its alliance commitments to stop some friendly states from going nuclear.  Looking to the future, Iran's possible nuclear acquisition and China’s military ascendancy may tempt key U.S. allies in the Middle East and East Asia to consider reducing their reliance on American security guarantees by acquiring independent nuclear deterrents.  When planning a response to the nuclear pursuit by these friends, the U.S. can draw lessons from the successes and failures of its nonproliferation efforts against its Cold War-era allies.

Coffee and tea provided. Please join us - Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.