Reports & Papers

124 Items

U.S. and Iranian negotiators sit around a cured table as media with cameras and microphones crowd the foreground.

Joe Klamar/Pool Photo via AP

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

Nuclear About-Face: Examining the Role of Collective Face Concerns in Iran's Nuclear Decision-Making

| July 2023

By looking beyond solely Iran’s security motivations, this paper by Sahar Nowrouzzadeh seeks to inform more holistic negotiation strategies that can potentially influence Iran’s nuclear decision-making in a manner more favorable to U.S. interests.

U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (right) Ukraine Minister of Defense Valeriy Shmarov (center) and Russian Federation Minister of Defense General of the Army Pavel Grachev (left)

Public Domain/Petty Officer 1st Class Todd P. Cichonowicz, U.S. Navy

Paper - Hague Centre for Strategic Studies

Hard Times for Arms Control: What Can Be Done?

| February 2022

The world has grown more dangerous but also less open to arms control measures that could limit some of the dangers. What can be done? Steven E. Miller offers a tour de force overview of both dismal and hopeful trends within arms control over the past decades, in this first paper of a new HCSS series on Arms Control.

Tomas Roggero via Flickr

Tomas Roggero via Flickr

Report Chapter - Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

Assuring Destruction Forever: 2022 Edition

| January 2022

Under the guidance of its self-defence nuclear strategy, China will continue to modernise its nuclear force in order to maintain a reliable second-strike retaliatory capability. China’s nuclear weapon modernisation has been responsive to the advances of military capabilities of other countries, particularly the US. As Hu Side emphasised, “The sole purpose for China to maintain a limited nuclear counterattack force is to deter a potential nuclear strike. However, the development of US missile defense and the long-rang strike capability with high accuracy to target mobile missiles is in practice to decrease the effectiveness of Chinese nuclear deterrence. Thus, it surely leads to Chinese attention."

YJ-18 missiles on display (Salah Rashad Zaqzoq/Wikimedia Commons).

Salah Rashad Zaqzoq/Wikimedia Commons

Report Chapter - International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility

China's Nuclear Weapons Strategy and Modernization Program

| Fall 2021

Recently published documents, news reports, and other sources of open source information indicate that China is accelerating its current nuclear force modernization programme. It is clear that it is driven largely in response to the growing United States (U.S.) missile defense program, which China perceives as a threat to its minimum credible deterrence. While China is not altering its nuclear doctrine, it believes that it needs to enhance the reliability, survivability, and effectiveness of its retaliatory capability in response to a first-strike. In addition to expanding the size of its nuclear arsenal, it is enhancing its delivery capabilities, for example, by increasing the number of ICBMs and making them more sophisticated. It is building more Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) warheads as well as a new class of ballistic missile submarines. China’s ongoing nuclear modernization aims to increase the survivability, reliability, safety, and penetration capability of its small nuclear arsenal and thereby assures a limited, reliable, and effective counterattack capability that will deter a nuclear first-strike. China’s nuclear modernization program will likely continue to be guided by its nuclear policy, which is characterized by a no-first-use pledge and a commitment to “minimum nuclear deterrence.” Finally, while China supports the total elimination of nuclear weapons, it does not believe it is in China’s interest to participate in discussions about nuclear disarmament until the U.S. and Russia reduce their arsenals to one thousand each, or lower.

A missile on display during a military parade in Moscow's Red Square in 2016.

Wikimedia Commons

Report Chapter - American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The Rise and Decline of Global Nuclear Order?

| April 2021

The first half century of the nuclear age witnessed the gradual construction of a global nuclear order designed to mitigate nuclear dangers, inhibit arms racing, and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states. Spurred by the experiences, the dangers, the crises, the near misses, and the frightening risks on display in the early years of the Cold War, sustained efforts were made, in McGeorge Bundy’s vivid phrase, “to cap the volcano.” The time had arrived, Bundy wrote in 1969, for the two great nuclear superpowers “to limit their extravagant contest in strategic weapons,” a contest that had “led the two greatest powers of our generation into an arms race totally unprecedented in size and danger.” In the subsequent twenty-five years after Bundy’s appeal, an increasingly elaborate and institutionalized arms control process produced, with many ups and downs, a detailed web of constraints on the nuclear behavior of the superpowers. The articulated goal was to stabilize the superpower nuclear balance by reinforcing mutual deterrence. The vast nuclear arsenals of the superpowers, however, were not the only source of nuclear danger. In a world in which the number of states armed with nuclear weapons was slowly growing and many additional states had interest in acquiring such weapons or the technology to produce them, there was reason, as Albert Wohlstetter warned in 1961, to be “concerned with the enormous instabilities and dangers of a world with many nuclear powers.” Such a world—“life in a nuclear armed crowd”—Wohlstetter wrote in a later famous study, was widely believed to be “vastly more dangerous than today’s world.” The desire to prevent this unattractive world led to the negotiation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, and to the subsequent development of an associated regime intended to create legal and technical barriers to the spread of nuclear weapons. Thus, in reaction to the major perceived dangers of the nuclear age, there emerged what Lawrence Freedman calls the “twin pillars” of the global nuclear order: mutual stability in the major nuclear rivalry and nonproliferation to inhibit or prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states.

The main hall for the IAEA’s Talks on Supplying Nuclear Fuel for Iranian Research Reactor, Vienna, Austria, 19 October 2009. 

Dean Calma/IAEA

Paper

The Deal That Got Away: The 2009 Nuclear Fuel Swap with Iran

| January 2021

With concerns and uncertainties regarding Iran’s nuclear future persisting to this day, this paper seeks to review the TRR negotiations and the context in which they unfolded in order to capture some of the lessons of negotiating with Iran regarding its nuclear program, primarily from the viewpoint of senior U.S. officials involved at the time. The paper is also informed by the personal perspective of one of the authors (Poneman) who led the U.S. delegation in the 2009 Vienna talks, and who, prior to this publication, had not publicly elaborated on his experience. The other author (Nowrouzzadeh), who supported the TRR talks in an analytical capacity within the U.S. Department of Defense, also conducted an extensive interview with Poneman as part of their collaboration on this paper. By drawing on existing literature and recent interviews with several senior U.S. officials involved in the negotiations now that over ten years have passed, the authors seek to draw useful lessons from this episode that can assist policymakers in understanding Iran’s nuclear decision-making and in their continued efforts to shape the future trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program.

Ilham Aliyev received OSCE Minsк Group co-chairs, February 2019

The Presidential Press and Information Office's of Azerbaijan

Report

OSCE Minsk Group: Lessons from the Past and Tasks for the Future

| Fall 2020

The international community, acting through the OSCE Minsk Group, has been unable to induce the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the Karabakh conflict, which began in 1988 and burst into a new round of fighting in September 2020. Leaders and populations on both sides had become increasingly maximalist; any leader willing to compromise could be branded a traitor. The 2020 fighting drastically changed facts on the ground. With Turkey’s assistance, Azerbaijan recovered much of the land it lost a generation previously. But Azerbaijan was compelled to permit Russia to deploy a large peacekeeping force, something it had resisted for 25 years. While its authority is diminished, the Minsk Group can play a role going forward in restoring confidence and communication between the sides, opening borders, and ultimately leading negotiations on the future status of the region.

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

A U.S. Diplomatic Service for the 21st Century

Many of the most serious challenges the United States will face in 2021 and beyond will require our diplomats to take the lead. These include the return of great power competition, leading a global response to the pandemic and its consequences, supporting American companies overseas during a devastating recession, mounting a major effort on climate change, negotiating an end to the Afghan and Iraq wars, and helping American citizens in every corner of the world who need the support of their government. Morale in the State Department, however, is at an all-time low and efforts to promote greater racial and ethnic diversity have failed just when the country needs women and men of all backgrounds as our primary link to nearly every country in the world. There are challenges to be met inside the Foreign Service, including an honest self-assessment of the Service’s internal culture.

Sensors and fencing at Japan's Integrated Support Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security.

Dean Calma/IAEA

Paper - American Nuclear Policy Initiative

The Trump Administration on Preventing Nuclear Terrorism

| May 2020

An act of nuclear terrorism anywhere in the world would be a humanitarian, economic, and political catastrophe. This is why reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism has been a priority for every US president for more than two decades. The most effective strategy for reducing this risk is to keep weapons-usable nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists by strengthening security at nuclear facilities around the globe. While the Trump administration continues to move forward with this mission, it has decreased the US focus on the most effective strategies for accomplishing it. Greater resources and political attention to international initiatives are needed to ensure that nuclear terrorism risks continue to decline. This paper reviews the key factors impacting nuclear terrorism risks and analyzes how much progress the Trump administration has made reducing that risk.

A satellite view of Shigatse, Tibet, home to the PLA’s 6th Border Defense Regiment, near the China-India border.

Maxar Technologies / CNES Airbus via Google, used with permission

Report - Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center

The Strategic Postures of China and India: A Visual Guide

| March 2020

Fueled by aggressive rhetoric from both capitals, Indian and Chinese ground forces engaged in a standoff between June and August 2017. The Doklam crisis, as it became known, stimulated introspection among officials and experts in both states about the future of their relationship. Politically, both strategic communities largely concluded that the peaceful resolution of border disputes is now less likely, forecasting more rivalry than cooperation. Militarily, Indian discussions on the strength of its military position against China in their disputed ground frontier areas have converged on the view that China holds the conventional and nuclear edge over India in this domain.

Based on our analysis of data on the location and capabilities of Indian and Chinese strategic forces and related military units, we conclude that this assessment of the balance of forces may be mistaken and a poor guide for Indian security and procurement policies. We recommend that instead of investing in new nuclear weapons platforms that our analysis suggests are not likely to be required to deter China, New Delhi should improve the survivability of its existing forces and fill the gap in global arms control leadership with an initiative on restraint and transparency.