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The central thrust of U.S. policy in Iraq must now be to help Sunnis organize an autonomous region and to convince Shias and Kurds that it is in their interest to make this possible. Paradoxically, announcing now a timetable for the inevitable withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq could give Washington additional leverage in influencing all sides to accept the necessary compromises.
Earlier this week the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, an extension of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, reported on efforts to protect America from terrorists that seek nuclear weapons and materials. Their verdict was not a happy one. Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton cited “insufficient progress” in the race against time to prevent the world’s most dangerous people from getting the world’s most dangerous weapons. In short, they wrote, “the size of the problem still dwarfs the policy response.”
Kean and Hamilton reported that less than half of Russia’s nuclear material has received security upgrades. In real terms, this means that more than 300 tons of loose nuclear material remains unguarded in Russia and the former Soviet states. That is enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium for tens of thousands of crude nuclear bombs. In the past year, moreover, security improvements were completed twice as slowly as expected. The Department of Energy’s nuclear security administration now estimates that this work will not be complete until 2020. Securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union is an essential front in the war on terror. We must progress at a faster rate. (Read More)
United States and India today are happily confronted by an unprecedented convergence of interests, values, and inter-societal ties in a way never experienced before in the close to sixty-year history of the bilateral relationship. Given India’s importance to the United States, the president should continue working with New Delhi toward a full partnership.
Discussants examine recent developments in a number of Gulf countries and analyze their significance in the overall process of political reform in the Gulf region. The workshop looked at the process of political change in specific countries, focusing on the domestic factors driving the reform process, how far the transformation has progressed, and how it is likely to unfold in the future.
A free trade agreement between the United States and the Andean countries has the potential not only to increase trade and promote economic growth, but also to develop stability and democracy in the Andes. However, if the negotiations are treated as a zero-sum competition, the agreement has the potential to undermine those very goals.
The 2005 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference attracted over 800
experts, officials, and journalists from around the world. The conference provided an open forum
for informed discussion on the most pressing nonproliferation issues facing the
world today, including
On November 3, the Democracy and Rule of Law Project and the Central European University co-sponsored a panel debate on how significant anti-Americanism actually is to American foreign policy.
Building the bomb was a feat of engineering and physics; controlling it would take politics and cooperation. This was clear to Harry S Truman when he tabled the first international nonproliferation proposal 60 years ago this November.
On November 15, 1945, President Truman joined with Prime Minister Clement Attlee of the United Kingdom and Prime Minister William Mackenzie King of Canada in a proposal for the future of atomic energy. The two-page statement called for careful planning by a new international atomic energy commission to be established by the United Nations. The statement itself also explicitly foreshadows the tension between energy needs and security imperatives that continues unresolved decades later. (Read More)
On Tuesday, October 25, the Chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Pete Domenici (R-NM) announced that Senate Energy appropriators would recede to the House position and eliminate funds for the controversial Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) from the fiscal year 2006 budget.
As a result, for the second year in a row, a bipartisan coalition of forces has denied funding for the RNEP, which should effectively end the research on nuclear earth penetrators.
The catalyst for the RNEP program was the Pentagon's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for the United States to develop "new nuclear weapon capabilities" to deal with targets located in deep underground, hardened bunkers. The next year, the Bush administration requested funds for research for a modified, high-yield bomb for this mission. (Read More)
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