Asia & the Pacific

The paper provides a detailed analysis of the contemporary Sino-Indian conventional ground and nuclear force balances and carefully reconstructs how mutual developments in these areas are perceived by both New Delhi and Beijing.

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.

"The recent New York Times Magazinearticle on the 'mysteries' remaining about the bin Laden raid offers no clear conclusions. But it does usefully point out that there could be a difference between the Pakistanis being aware that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, and not being informed of the impending attack against him."

"In the 1950's the CIA, developer of the U-2 spy plane, carried out reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union, starting from the Pakistani military base in Peshawar. The ISI, the intelligence service of the all-powerful Pakistani Army, was assigned to coordinate these flights with CIA personnel in Pakistan. Thus began the longstanding relationship between the CIA, a civilian intelligence service, and the ISI, a military intelligence service, a relationship that lasted all through the years...."

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.

"Much of the ambiguity in Pakistani foreign policy stems from its inferiority complex vis-a-vis India. Though Pakistan is hardly a small country (pop. 188 million), it is dwarfed by is neighbor (pop. 1.22 billion) and has lost a series of wars with India since Partition, which in retrospect is regarded by many as having been a mistake. Pakistan lost Kashmir, whose Hindu maharajah turned the Muslim majority province over to India. The institutions of British India went to the Indians at Partition, and Pakistan had to seek out and build a new capital at Islamabad."

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.

"The origins of what Carrie faces over Season 4—and which her successors as chief of station in Islamabad will continue to face in the future, were largely presented accurately in Charlie Wilson's War, a dramatic account of that war that the two of us developed and oversaw when we were at CIA."

Part of NTI's Innovating Verification reports series, Verifying Baseline Declarations of Nuclear Warheads and Materials analyzes how baseline declarations can contribute to near- and long-term arms control and non-proliferation goals and how to verify them without compromising sensitive information.

Despite substantial progress in improving nuclear security in recent years, there is more to be done.  The threats of nuclear theft and terrorism remain very real.  This paper recommends learning from the much stronger national and international efforts in nuclear safety, and in particular taking steps to build international understanding of the threat; establish effective performance objectives; assure performance; train and certify needed personnel; build security culture and exchange best practices; reduce the number of sites that need to be protected; and strengthen the international framework and continue the dialogue once leaders are no longer meeting regularly at the summit level.