Blog Post
While we are always sad to see colleagues go, we are proud to send several Belfer Center members off to serve in the new Bush Administration. That so many of our colleagues advised Governor Bush during the campaign, served on his transition team, and have been selected for posts in the new administration came as a surprise only to observers who were skeptical about the Center''s political diversity and commitment to serious non-partisan research.
As the new U.S. Trade Representative, BCSIA Research Fellow Bob Zoellick will lead the administration''s initiatives to enlarge open trading markets and strengthen international institutions like NAFTA and ASEAN. Bob is a sterling example of the new generation of foreign policy experts who move seamlessly across economic, security, and political dimensions of issues.
BCSIA Board member Bob Blackwill served as a key advisor to candidate Bush and played an active role in his National Security Council transition team. Former Center Executive Director and Kennedy School Professor Rich Falkenrath has been nominated to head up Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense at the NSC. BCSIA Faculty Associate Jendayi Frazer has been proposed as Director for African Affairs on the NSC staff.
The Center is also proud to have played a part in helping inform an important new initiative to address the global nuclear threat. In another extraordinary act of what has been called "adventure capital philanthropy," Ted Turner has committed $50 million a year for each of the next five years to a new operating foundation led by Sam Nunn that will attempt to substantially reduce nuclear threats. With their colleague Charles Curtis, the new foundation''s chief operating officer, Turner and Nunn spent a full day at BCSIA in October developing a plan of action for the new Nuclear Threat Initiative.
On the Center''s "loose nukes" agenda, let me recommend the report of a Task Force chaired by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler on which I served. The Task Force reviewed and graded a decade of efforts to contain Russian nuclear weapons and materials. Our report proposes a comprehensive strategy to "secure and/or eliminate all excess Russian nuclear weapons and weapons-useable material over the next ten years."
Finally, in cooperation with the producers of the new blockbuster, "Thirteen Days," the Center has created a Web site— http://www.cubanmissilecrisis.org— for viewers who find their curiosity pricked about what really happened in the most dangerous moment in human history, and about the relevance of that event for nuclear dangers today. While the film contains a number of historical inaccuracies, the dramatization is, nonetheless, largely on target in conveying central truths about the crisis: most importantly, the real possibility that these events could have led to nuclear war.
President Bush invited Senator Kennedy and other members of the family to screen the film with him at the White House in early February. That was followed by a screening for members of Congress, followed by a panel discussion in which Robert McNamara (President Kennedy''s Secretary of Defense), Roald Sagdeev (former head of Soviet missile defense programs) and I participated.
From the Web site the Center created, you can listen to Kennedy''s secret tapes of deliberations among advisers; hear Kennedy''s announcement of the blockade on October 22, 1962; read his summary of lessons of the missile crisis in his historic American University speech; examine critiques of Kennedy''s performance during the missile crisis; and explore nuclear dangers today— from "loose nukes" to the risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
— Graham T. Allison