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Many U.S. officials and experts are surprised by India’s reluctance to support Iran’s referral to the Security Council. They should not be. Politically, no Indian government can afford to appear subservient to U.S. interests. New Delhi values an independent foreign policy shaped, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said, by its own geography, economics and domestic considerations. At a press conference in New York on September 16, Prime Minister Singh pointed out that India is located in the region neighboring Iran, that there are three-and-a-half million Indian workers in the Middle East and that India has the second largest Shiite population in the world, trailing only Iran itself. “Any flare up would present immense difficulties,” he said. (Read More)
ISSUE BRIEF--The crisis is not over and there are important verification and implementation details to negotiate. But we have turned an important nuclear corner on the Korean Peninsula. The new agreement by North Korea to give up all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and return to the Non-Proliferation Treaty is a major success for all the nations in the Six-Party talks. It is a victory for the United States who insisted on the complete end of these programs. It is a victory for North Korea, which has won a non-aggression pledge from the US and economic and energy aid. It is a victory for China, which patiently insisted on solving the stand-off through negotiations and played the key role in reaching the agreement. Finally, it is a victory for the “Libya model” over the “Iraq model”: end threats by changing a regime’s behavior, not by eliminating the regime. (Read More)
There are over 3,700 metric tons of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium in global stockpiles, according to a recent report by the Institute for Science and International Security.
This is a summary of what we know about Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s decades-long involvement in the illegal transfer of nuclear materials and technologies.
The complete extent of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s decades-long involvement in the illegal transfer of nuclear materials is not known. The details are submerged in Khan’s work. As more information is released from those who have questioned Khan and his network partners, a more complete image of the nuclear black market will emerge. This chronology summarizes what we now know.
Decades later, the debate rages on. Should the atomic bomb have been dropped on innocent civilians? Did the devastation of Hiroshima and, sixty years ago today, of Nagasaki save American lives? Robert L. Gallucci, Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, says no, he would not have used the bomb on cities. "Our targets should be military forces and leadership… President Truman should have looked for targets that were primarily military or genuine war industry… It is unlikely that Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be so described." On the other hand, Thomas Donnelly, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, sees the decision to drop the bomb as necessary for the sake of saving lives. "The use of atomic weapons did not bring a world without war, but it did bring an end to the most lethal conflict in human history … I hope I would have made the same decision to shorten the agony that was WWII in the Pacific."
In a fascinating article, the July issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asks eight experts and historians to weigh in on the question: "Would you have dropped the bomb?" We provide highlights of two essays on each side – supporting the decision and arguing against it. (Read More)
Sixty-six years ago this month, Albert Einstein sent an urgent letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “It may become possible,” he warned, “to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.” The military consequences were obvious. “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” Worse, the Nazis might already be hard at work on just such a project, “I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over.” (Read More)
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