News & Announcements

"Nuclear South Asia: An Analyst's Guide to India, Pakistan, and the Bomb" is a free, open online course from the Stimson Center that addresses nuclear themes and challenges in South Asia. It is meant to provide strategic analysts in India and Pakistan—and the interested public in all countries—a platform to study these issues and engage in a serious, informed conversation. MTA Associate Jayita Sarkar delivered Section 2's Lecture 3.

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.

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.

Mark S. Bell's summer 2015 International Security article, "Beyond Emboldenment: How Acquiring Nuclear Weapons Can Change Foreign Policy," is one of two co-winners of the 2016 Patricia Weitsman Award for Outstanding International Security Studies Section Graduate Paper. The paper proffers a new a typology that innovatively delineates the ways in which the acquisition of nuclear weapons can alter the foreign policy behavior of current and future nuclear states.

On April 28, the Project on Managing the Atom joined the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, The Netherlands government, and the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) in convening nuclear nonproliferation experts from around the world at the United Nations to participate in a Symposium on the 2015 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

On October 21, 2014, Trevor Findlay, senior research fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom, chaired a session of the International Atomic Energy Agency's quadrennial Symposium on International Safeguards held at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. In addition to chairing the session on "Performance Management in Non-profit Organizations," he also presented a paper with a powerpoint slides on IAEA nuclear safeguards culture, "IAEA Safeguards Culture: 'Candy Concept' or Powerful Prism?"

The ninth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York from April 27-May 22, 2015. This is the fourth such conference since the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. Participating governments will discuss nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy with a view to arriving at consensus on a number of issues.

Amidst intense negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 countries in Vienna on Iran's nuclear program, Professor Matthew Bunn was interviewed for a July 14 article in the Tehran Times about what a comprehensive agreement would look like and how the two sides of the dispute should approach the talks to obtain significant and substantive results.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs today launches a new website – Nuclear Security Matters – that provides policymakers, researchers, journalists, and the interested public with a wealth of facts, analysis, key documents, and other resources critical to the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit goal of preventing nuclear terrorism around the globe.

Nuclear Security Matters was developed by the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom with input from Center nuclear experts Graham Allison, Matthew Bunn, Trevor Findlay, Gary Samore, William Tobey, and others.

In October, 2012, at the foot of a rocky hillside in eastern Kazakhstan, a group of American, Russian, and Kazakh nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony marking the completion of a secret 17-year, $150 million operation to secure plutonium in the tunnels of Degelen Mountain—an abandoned site of Soviet underground nuclear testing. "Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing," a report released today by The Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, provides details on one of the largest nuclear security operations of the post-Cold War years.