News & Announcements

“It was too quiet.”

That was the sentiment expressed by a number of the 45 election officials from 23 states who gathered earlier this month at Harvard for a Belfer Center Defending Digital Democracy (D3P) Midterm After-Action Conference to discuss problems around their November midterm elections.  Most said they experienced significant but mostly unintended misinformation – and some disinformation – along with a number of other challenges to their electoral processes, but not the extensive foreign cyber and other attacks that took place during the 2016 presidential election.

The Right Honourable Douglas Alexander offered his views on European security in a discussion moderated by FDP Executive Director Cathryn Cluver.

Putin and his government seek respect, stability from next U.S. administration, panel says.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nuclear terrorism remains a real and urgent threat. Despite an array of mechanisms established to combat this threat, several serious problems persist, requiring relentless attention and actions by the United States, Russia and other responsible nations. These problems include continuing nuclear security vulnerabilities in a number of countries and the continued incidents of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials, radioactive sources and the various components.

This new report, “Steps to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism: Recommendations Based on the U.S.-Russia Joint Threat Assessment,” was produced jointly by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies (ISKRAN). The study outlines concrete steps for the United States and Russia to take in leading international efforts to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism.

A group of high-ranking U.S. and Russian former government officials, retired military officers, and academics has proposed a series of joint steps that would be necessary to move the two countries beyond the Cold War doctrine of mutual deterrence with nuclear weapons. A new report authored by these nuclear-arms experts says that improved relations between the United States and Russia since 1990 have not resulted in corresponding easing back from the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation. The report suggests a path for the two countries to put nuclear weapons in a context appropriate to the post-Cold War relationship.