News & Announcements

Leading up to and during the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, Belfer Center experts released reports, published commentary, and provided insight and analysis into global nuclear security. In advance of the Summit, the Project on Managing the Atom set the stage for discussion with the report Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?

An in-progress compilation of the expert commentary and analysis is available here.

Former national security advisors from the United States and Israel discussed the latest efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum on September 16.  Belfer Center Director Graham Allison moderated a lively conversation between Thomas Donilon, U.S. national security advisor from 2010 to 2013 and currently a senior fellow with the Belfer Center, and Major General (Ret.) Yaakov Amidror, Israeli national security advisor from 2011-2013.

This seminar examined the prospects for further nuclear arms reductions between the United States and Russia, including the possibility that negotiations might be expanded to weapons not limited by the New START Treaty. The seminar covered U.S. and Russian differences over missile defense and how those might be resolved to allow a cooperative NATO-Russia missile defense arrangement for Europe.

In Harvard Professor Graham Allison’s view, “the significant unknowns” during the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly catapulted John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev into nuclear war. For former diplomat Nicholas Burns, the principal take-away from the crisis was the importance of giving an adversary a way out of a confrontation short of complete surrender. Allison and Burns were panelists on Oct. 14 at a forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston to consider the modern lessons flowing from the missile crisis. The event kicked off an intensive series of seminars and workshops for scholars from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to mark the 50th anniversary of the missile crisis. Panel moderator Juliette Kayyem, Kennedy School lecturer in public policy, reminded the audience that the missile crisis is often framed through the myth of the tough American president staring down the Russian foe and making him blink. Kayyem said that version fails to capture the nuanced secret diplomacy and the American concessions that made a deal possible.

President-elect Barack Obama announced in his radio address Saturday that he has selected Harvard's John P. Holdren to serve as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology in the new administration. The post, popularly known as "the President's science advisor," also includes directorship of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and requires Senate confirmation.