Asia & the Pacific

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

Joseph S. Nye writes that If there is one person other than Vladimir Putin who can end Russia's war in Ukraine, it is Chinese President Xi Jinping. But Xi has so far remained on the sidelines and is likely to stay there, owing to various domestic political vulnerabilities and his own lack of courage and imagination.

Joseph Nye argues hat the major threat to U.S. power comes from its internal divisions. These are serious liabilities but they were not created by the invasion of Ukraine.

Joseph Nye writes that with the news dominated by dramatic examples of countries using coercion, intimidation, and payoffs to advance their interests, the power of attraction would seem to be irrelevant in international relations. But it still matters, and governments ignore its potential at their peril.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

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.

Joseph Nye asks: When the next terrorist attacks come, will US presidents be able to channel public demand for revenge by precise targeting, explaining the trap that terrorists set, and focusing on creating resilience in U.S. responses? That is the question Americans should be asking, and that their leaders should be addressing.

What sounded so simple during last year’s presidential campaign has turned out, like everything related to Iran, to be quite complicated.

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.