Articles

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

"Nuclear proliferation is a crime that pays well. Those involved in the Khan network were made very wealthy for their efforts, and the inability of the international community to effectively punish them has resulted in a missed opportunity to provide a deterrent against future black-market salesmen."

Recent national trends in investments in global energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) are inconsistent around the world. Public RD&D investments in energy are the metric most commonly used in international comparative assessments of energy-technology innovation, and the metric employed in this article. Overall, the data indicate that International Energy Agency (IEA) member country government investments have been volatile: they peaked in the late 1970s, declined during the subsequent two decades, bottomed out in 1997, and then began to gradually grow again during the 2000s.

The problem of global climate change will be solved by meeting stringent, long-term policy targets that are much more ambitious than the short-term, greenhouse gas emissions reductions that some countries currently attempt to reach. 

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As with most of the other states of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the democratization of Azerbaijan has not progressed as Washington had hoped it would when the Soviet Union first began to dissolve. During the past six months, President Aliyev has been incapacitated by failing health. The problems that emerged as a result of his illness demonstrated that Azerbaijan has not yet succeeded in building government institutions that are sufficiently independent of the leadership. Hence, if the elections are not conducted in a fair and free manner, foreign disappointment with the government may increase."

Carter, Deutch, and Zelikow addresses the threat of Catastrophic Terrorism in Foreign Affairs.

Lately, China’s nuclear industry is entering a new round of fast development.  China pursues reprocessing of civilian spent fuel and recycling the plutonium thus gained in mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel for light-water reactors (LWR) and in fast breeder reactors. At a time when plutonium recycling programs are being phased out worldwide, this paper will examine whether plutonium recycling makes sense for China, taking into account economic costs, nuclear energy security, and environmental aspects.

Policymakers and scholars agree that North Korea’s nuclear program heightens the risk of nuclear transfer to the global black market. Althuogh the North Koreans engage in illicit activity primarily to acquire hard currency, broader economic and ideological factors may also contribute to a decision to export nuclear materials. North Korea also risks losing control over its smuggling networks as it relies more and more on nonstate criminal actors. The United States, then, must seek to develop and employ new strategies to pursue and dismantle these networks as well as offer economic incentives to the regime. In the case of North Korea, countersmuggling and counterproliferation could go hand in hand.