Asia & the Pacific

Kari A. Bingen and Heather W. Williams write that if Russia plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space to target satellites, the threat is definitely serious—and the U.S. should act fast.

One of the lingering legacies of the Cold War was the enormous nuclear arsenals amassed by the two superpowers. When one of them, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in 1991, its nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons were located on the territory of not one but four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. Although command-and-control of Soviet strategic missiles was centralized in Moscow, the specter of the single largest wave of horizontal nuclear proliferation loomed after 1991. By 1994, however, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had decided to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapons states and to give up the missiles on their soil. Drawing on previously untapped archival records, this article reconstructs the divergent paths of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine toward relinquishing their armaments. A combination of domestic and international political factors contributed to the resolution of the problem. Among the various contributing factors, the NPT stands out as a salient force that provided normative framing and guided deliberations on post-Soviet nuclear disarmament.

In the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021, Mariana Budjeryn writes about the Chernobyl disaster 35 years later, while Ali Ahmad writes about nuclear power and climate change resilience.

Chernobyl still stands for the world’s worst nuclear accident. The full impact of a nuclear disaster on this scale is difficult to compute, not least because the effects that count most are often those that are most difficult to count. Beyond the number of lives lost and people displaced, beyond the money spent on accident mitigation and remediation, there are long-term health, environmental, social, economic, and political consequences that defy quantification. Thirty-five years on, we are still grappling with the full extent of Chernobyl’s impact on the world. Yet in a very real sense, we live in a world shaped by Chernobyl.

1. We must learn from and remember the lessons of the past—while recognizing that Fukushima is not going to “happen again” as future accidents will have their own characteristics; while remembering the past, we must also avail ourselves of advances in seismology, climatology, engineering, etc.

Ten years after the Fukushima Daiichi accident and 35 years after the tragedy at Chernobyl, the lessons learned from the two most severe nuclear disasters in history remain contested. New challenges continue to emerge even as significant progress has been made in many areas to reduce the chances of another major nuclear incident. From March 3-5, the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) brought together three dozen experts for a conference exploring the lingering effects of Fukushima and Chernobyl and the evolution of the nuclear safety, security, and governance regimes in their aftermath.

The viability of nuclear energy has long focused on concerns about nuclear safety. The government and industry responses to the three major nuclear reactor accidents—Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and Fukushima—offer insights about how to prevent and respond to nuclear accidents. While there is no perfect strategy for prevention or response, past experience can and should inform decisions on regulating nuclear power in the future. The following comparison of three accidents reveals that independent oversight and a strong safety culture are paramount to rapid response, organized evacuation and repopulation, and clear communication to local publics during and after an accident at a nuclear power plant.

Rebecca Davis Gibbons writes that having a full appreciation of the consequences of nuclear weapons and their place in society means learning from the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but also from the stories from other survivors of nuclear explosions: those who lived and worked adjacent to testing sites in Algeria, French Polynesia, Australia, the United States, France, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Western China, and Kazakhstan.

Polls in the United States and nine allied countries in Europe and Asia show that public support for a nuclear test is very low. If the Trump administration conducts a test, then it shouldn't expect backing from Americans or its closest U.S. partners.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published a document from the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs concerning nuclear problems and tensions in the time of COVID-19. The document has been co-signed by a large number of Pugwash colleagues and personalities.