Nuclear proliferation

  • It’s easy to miss amid the escalation of sanctions and nuclear bravado, but EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Tehran’s lead negotiator Saeed Jalili will meet on May 15 in Istanbul to follow up on last months talks between the P5+1 and Iran.

    The last round of multilateral talks ended inconclusively, and it has taken a little over a month to get even a one-on-one meeting on the calendar. While no date has been set for a new round of talks with representatives from all seven countries at the table, the upcoming meeting between Ashton and Jalili provides an opportunity to begin planning for how to make negotiations more productive than previous attempts.

    Getting on a road more promising than the current intermittent exchanges will require a few key steps:

    May 13, 2013 - By Reza Marashi
  • As tensions have risen in the face of North Korea’s heated rhetoric, the U.S. media has been running non-stop, and often inflammatory, coverage of every new development. Unfortunately, much of the coverage has been neither useful nor informative and cuts against the opinion of many North Korea experts by touting the DPRK as a direct threat to the United States. Most experts aren’t concerned with the prospect of a preemptive military strike from North Korea. We’ve seen this pattern of provocation before. Instead, experts worry that the situation could spiral out of control, spurring a real crisis on the Korean peninsula.

    April 17, 2013 - By Rebecca Remy
  • The Iran Project, a group of leading national security experts and former officials, and a grantee of Ploughshares Fund, has published a new report about the costs and benefits of international sanctions against Iran. The report, endorsed by 38 leading national security figures, springs from the observation that “the costs of sanctions themselves are not routinely addressed in the public or policymaking debate.”

    December 7, 2012 - By Yelena Altman
  • Say what you will about North Korea. It’s “backwards,” impoverished, isolated, led by an enigmatic, secretive leader, or even that it is “the land of no smiles” whose people live a life on the edge of survival.

    September 27, 2012 - By Paul Carroll
  • A quick scan of daily headlines will prove that there has been no shortage of debate over Iran’s nuclear program.

    September 14, 2012 - By Leah Fae Cochran
  • The following is a guest post by Gregory Kulacki, Senior Analyst & China Project Manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

    August 1, 2012 - By admin
  • Critics of a recent deal between North Korea and the United States had barely caught their breath before an announcement today by Pyongyang that North Korea plans to launch a satellite atop a long-range rocket in mid-April. It’s hard to argue that this isn’t a setback. But it’s also premature to write the whole thing off.

    March 16, 2012 - By Paul Carroll
  • Anniversaries have a way of generating reflection and re-assessment, and that is a good thing. But next week’s anniversary of the Fukushima catastrophe risks missing a huge piece of the story – that ALL things nuclear are inherently risky and that our assumptions about how we can control them need to be rethought.

    March 9, 2012 - By Paul Carroll
  • South Asia is one of the world’s nuclear hotspots. Pakistan posesses the one of the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenals and is politically unstable. India, also armed with nuclear weapons, has been to war with Pakistan three times in the last three decades. And Afghanistan, plagued by war and terrorism, threatens to destabilize the region.

    December 21, 2011 - By admin
  • In Washington, it seems everything is a partisan issue these days. From government spending to immigration laws, tax policy to war strategy, policymakers are trapped in a partisan gridlock.

    December 9, 2011 - By admin