News & Announcements

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News - BBC News

Ukraine Conflict: How Dangerous Is Russia's Nuclear Plant Attack?

| Mar. 04, 2022

Russian forces have seized the largest nuclear plant in Europe, Ukrainian authorities say. It comes hours after a fire broke out at the Zaporizhzhia plant following a Russian attack. The fire has since been extinguished, and officials say the site is safe but Western powers have condemned Russia for what they called a "horrific" and "reckless" act, and Ukrainian President Zelensky says the attack could have caused "six Chernobyls". Mariana Budjeryn is a Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom  at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. She says that as far as we know, the shelling hit a number of facilities but that the flow of electricity must be kept constant to allow the fuel to keep cooling. She goes on to say that reactors are protected to withstand a certain level of impact, but none have been designed to withstand sustained artillery fire. She says there is concern that at this level of hostilities, there is a risk of a serious nuclear accident, or one that is planned to stop the war quickly and on Russia conditions. "You can't just hit a switch on a nuclear reactor - there are still a number of procedures that have to be followed quite closely to keep that reactor safe."

News - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Russiagate: Everything You Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask

| May 04, 2017

The Belfer Center's incoming senior fellows, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers, provided their insights into Russia's influence over the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Belfer Center Director Graham Allison moderated.

Natalie Jaresko at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Benn Craig

News

Natalie Jaresko discusses her time as Finance Minister of Ukraine with Harvard's Future of Diplomacy Project

| Dec. 21, 2016

Natalie Jaresko (MPP ’89), former Finance Minister of Ukraine, returned to Harvard on October 31st, 2016 to take part in the Future of Diplomacy Project’s international speaker series. In a public seminar moderated by Faculty Director Nicholas Burns, Jaresko, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Aspen Institute Kyiv, reflected on her time in office from 2014 to 2016. In her two years in office, the Ukrainian government  had to contend with the Russian annexation of Crimea, a national debt crisis, widespread governmental corruption, and political instability.

Peiter Zatko (aka Mudge), Robert M. Lee, and Michael Sulmeyer of Harvard University's Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project an event at Harvard to discuss the recent cyberattack on Ukraine's power grid.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/CS Monitor

News - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Cyber Operations Against Ukraine's Grid

Feb. 04, 2016

Director Michael Sulmeyer of the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs welcomed industry experts Robert Lee, CEO of Dragos Security and former U.S. Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations Officer, and Mudge, founder of the Cyber Independent Testing Laboratory, with previous experience as a DoD official for DARPA and Deputy Director of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Division, to get to ground truth on this attack and its implications.

News - Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center

Fresh Ideas for the Future: Symposium on the NPT Nuclear Disarmament, Non-proliferation, and Energy

Apr. 30, 2015

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.