Articles

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

In recent years, American treaty behavior has produced growing concern among both allies and less friendly nations. On such fundamental issues as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights, civil liberties, environmental disasters, and commerce, the United States has generated confusion and anger abroad. Such a climate is not conducive to needed cooperation in the conduct of foreign and security policy. Among U.S. actions that have caused concern are the failure to ratify several treaties; the attachment of reservations, understandings, and declarations before ratification; the failure to support a treaty regime once ratified; and treaty withdrawal. The structural and historical reasons for American treaty behavior are deeply rooted in the United States' system of government and do not merely reflect superpower arrogance.

Failure to develop a comprehensive contingency plan, such as the one proposed here, and inform the American public, where appropriate, about its particulars will only serve to amplify the devastating impact of any nuclear attack on a U.S. city

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

Op-ed by Dr. Ashton B. Carter and Dr. Graham T. Allison in The Washington Post

A careful reader of the discussion in the Russian and American national security community could conclude that Americans are more concerned about the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack than are Russians. Specifically, American experts have described more vividly potential nuclear terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than have Russians, at least in the writings and conversations that are publicly accessible. Why this is the case is a puzzle. No one doubts that in Chechen fighters Russia faces serious, capable, determined adversaries. Moreover, if Chechnya succeeded in capturing, stealing, or buying a nuclear weapon (or material from which they could make a nuclear weapon), their first target would surely be Moscow, not New York or Washington DC.

The day after Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze jointly condemned the action and announced a cutoff of arms to Iraq. In the weeks that followed the Soviet Union not only voted for each U.N. resolution condemning Iraq and demanding its withdrawal,but also played an important role in persuading others to go along. Had the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations voted no, thus denying the United Nations authority, would President Bush have gone forward? Try to imagine the U.S.-led international offensive against Saddam Hussein absent active Soviet cooperation.

This issue focuses on the threat of nuclearization of the Third World through nuclear proliferation, loose nukes from Russia.

Symposium: Contempory Issues in Controlling Weapons of Mass Destruction

If the Cold War is over and our nuclear nemesis has "retargeted" its nuclear weapons, why does a nuclear threat still hang over us? The answer is that the demise of the Soviet Union left behind an arsenal of thirty thousand nuclear warheads and seventy thousand nuclear weapons-equivalents 3/4 lumps of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium. These items are now located in a society convulsed by a revolution whose central control systems cannot even collect taxes. Russian society has become increasingly free, increasingly chaotic, and increasingly criminalized.