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The denuclearisation of North Korea is unlikely. Neither pressure nor rewards will persuade North Korean decision-makers to surrender their nuclear weapons because they have good reasons to see den...

North Korea and the United States are edging towards re-engagement. They agree in principle on pursuing a phased approach to negotiations but disagree on how to begin and what the end goal should b...

The emerging consensus in the United States is that the real US objective in talks with North Korea should no longer be its denuclearisation. The superficially sensible conventional wisdom underlyi...

While many consider the threat posed by nuclear weapons to be greater than ever, the general public has largely lost interest in the issue of nuclear disarmament. To reinvigorate public support for...

I argue that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) not only fails to address non-quantitative forms of nuclear proliferation, but also acts as a proliferator of the symbolic ...

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) constitutes just one component of broader arrangements that provide global nuclear governance. In recent decades, the other props in the global nuclear or...

The United States and Russia agreed to extend the 2010 New START Treaty in February 2021. Many analysts believed that this step would reinvigorate the US-Russian arms control process, lead to deeper reductions in nuclear weapons, and possibly pave the path to nuclear disarmament. However, the United States and Russia might find it difficult to agree on an agenda for the next round of arms control negotiations, and neither may be willing to accept deeper reductions in their numbers of nuclear weapons. Changes in the international security environment, stresses in the US-Russian relationship, and increases in the size and scope of China’s nuclear arsenal may all impede progress. As a result, the next steps in arms control may focus on transparency, communication, norms, and risk reduction measures, both as a way to mitigate the risk of nuclear war and to, possibly, create the conditions needed for further reductions in the future.

Arms control has increasingly become threatened by compliance issues. Viewed individually, these issues might be expected and should not be cause for alarm. However, the list of agreements with unr...

Increasingly, policymakers, observers and scholars are calling for including China in nuclear arms-control efforts. Missing from debates, however, is a thorough analysis of Chinese perspectives. Dr...

Professor Colin S. Gray dedicated his life to a careful examination of international relations and factors that influence states’ foreign policy and defense choices, among other topics in his excel...

An exceedingly challenging agenda of urgent, important, and diverse arms control issues awaits the incoming Biden administration. To address it, the administration should consider the creation of a...

Verification inspections that support nuclear weapon arms control treaties can require photographs to be taken as part of the inspection evidence. In a nuclear weapon facility, the host would generally want to review images before they are released to the inspector to prevent the accidental release of sensitive information. Currently, giving the host sole custody of the images for review severely impacts the confidence of the inspector that the images are genuine and unmodified. This paper outlines how simple cryptographic methods can be employed to allow the host sole custody for review while maintaining the inspector's confidence in the veracity of the images. The concept is then expanded to propose and illustrate the capability for the host to redact a portion of an image while still allowing the inspector to verify that the remainder of the image is genuine. The ability to allow a host to have sole custody of images for review, and even redaction, without affecting inspector confidence in the veracity of the images they receive would contribute to improved processes for nuclear weapon verification in future arms control treaties.

Even at the height of the Cold War, Washington and Moscow found ways to cooperate on nuclear issues. But what brought the two rivals to the negotiating table in the first place? History points to G...

The United States and Russia must take the decision to extend the New START nuclear arms control treaty for five years by February, 2021 or the agreement will expire. Extension of New START will te...

Many see the advent of lethal autonomous weapon systems as the next revolution in military affairs. Currently, some 30 countries share the view that these weapons should be preemptively banned, but...

Sig Hecker is one of the world’s foremost nuclear security and policy experts and has for decades served as a go-to source for journalists writing about nuclear affairs. An emeritus fellow at Stanf...

Without proper attention, the arms-control system – built during the previous halfcentury but neglected over the last several years – will continue to disintegrate.

The administration of President Donald J. Trump has consistently used fear of China to undermine nearly five decades of bipartisan consensus on US–Russian nuclear arms control. The negative consequ...

Where is nuclear arms control—negotiated restraints on the deadliest weapons of mass destruction—headed? This 50-year tool of US national security policy is currently under attack. The New Strategi...

That nuclear arms control is on the way out is no news. The unraveling of its Cold War-era architecture started almost two decades ago, when US President George W. Bush welcomed Vladimir Putin to h...

What role can conventional arms control (CAC) and confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs) play in crises and conflicts? By examining the use of CAC and CSBMs during the Russian-Georgian ...

Asia, with the world's largest population, extensive natural resources and fast growing economies, has become one of the world's most dynamic regions and a theatre for a variety of actors, distinct...

This article explains China’s abortive attempt to stop North Korean nuclear development between 1993 and 2016. It attributes this failure to two international conditions. The first is geographical ...

The Fukushima accident of 2011 pulled von Hippel back into the reactor-safety world. He was invited to join a Congressionally-mandated four-year study of the lessons that could be learned from the Fukushima accident to improve the safety of US nuclear plants. During that study he learned more about both a much worse accident that almost happened at Fukushima, and about how the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission had come to use “risk-informed regulation” as a way to avoid requiring costly safety upgrades opposed by US nuclear utilities. He campaigned unsuccessfully at both the national and state levels to move the nuclear utilities away from densely packed spent fuel pools by moving fuel that had cooled for more than five years to dry-cask storage. He also promoted on-site dry-cask storage in Japan and South Korea as an alternative to reprocessing. This last chapter ends with some stories of his father, also a physicist, who would not be intimidated and who was a leader in the development of the field of materials science and engineering.

How much agency do African states have to shape global orders? This study puts the global nuclear order under scrutiny to answer this question. It amounts to a demanding case. Arms control is somet...

von Hippel describes a transparency tour during the summer of 1989 to the Soviet Union’s first plutonium-production complex in the Urals and to the Soviet test site for anti-satellite lasers in Kazakhstan. In December 1991, immediately after Ukraine declared independence, he participated in a mission to persuade it to return its nuclear weapons to Russia. He describes the thus far unsuccessful effort to dispose of the weapons plutonium that the US and Soviet Union declared excess at the end of the Cold War. The discussion then turns to the US-Russian lab-to-lab program in which the US nuclear-weapon laboratories helped Russia upgrade the security of its plutonium and highly-enriched uranium for the new and more open environment and to the failed US Government attempts to help Russia downsize its huge nuclear weapons complex. Also, in 1991, a summer school was hosted at the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute (MPTI) for young scientists interested in nuclear arms control that has been an annual event ever since and also led to the creation of an arms control center at MPTI. In 1988, von Hippel was involved in a first seminar on nuclear arms control with China’s nuclear-weapons establishment. Finally, he describes a 1993 meeting with President Clinton’s new Secrtary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, that laid the basis for the president’s decision that the US could sustain its nuclear weapons without testing.

The onset of a crisis in US-Russian and global arms control has generated manifold proposals on ways to rejuvenate productive negotiations on weapons cuts and confidence building measures. Yet most...

The next president will have to deal with many pressing questions, but few are as consequential as this one: Do we want to live in a world in which the number of nuclear weapons is going up or goin...

Russian military officials, scholars, and politicians have long been aware of reconnaissance-strike systems, and have developed a sophisticated set of military countermeasures, as well as a number ...

On 24 May 2018, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched his new “disarmament agenda” in an address at the University of Geneva. The UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) simultaneously released a 73-page “non-paper” that elaborated this new agenda. In October 2018, UNODA issued the agenda’s implementation plan. This article will describe the key themes and specific proposals of this disarmament initiative. It will identify those features that represent both continuity and change relative to past proposals by other Secretaries-General. It will also discuss the agenda’s initial impacts, obstacles encountered, and future opportunities for progress. Finally, it will offer some reflections on the broader role of the United Nations, its Secretariat, and its Secretary-General in advancing global disarmament objectives.

Nuclear disarmament treaties are not sufficient in and of themselves to neutralize the existential threat of nuclear weapons. Technologies are necessary for verifying the authenticity of the nuclear warheads undergoing dismantlement before counting them toward a treaty partner’s obligation. Here we present a review of concepts involving isotope-specific resonance processes, Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence (NRF) [1] and Neutron Resonance Transmission Analysis (NRTA) [2, 3], used to authenticate a warhead’s fissile components by comparing them to a previously authenticated template. All information is encrypted in the physical domain by the addition of an encrypting filter to the target, leading to measurements with an outcome similar to an equation with two unknowns. Using Monte Carlo simulations and experiments, we show that the measurements readily detect hoaxing attempts, while no significant isotopic or geometric information about the weapon is released. These nuclear techniques can be used to dramatically increase the reach and trustworthiness of future nuclear disarmament treaties.

This section covers von Hippel’s first engagement with nuclear-weapons issues, starting with a review of a US Secretary of Defense’s claim that a Soviet nuclear first strike on US nuclear weapons would kill only 15,000–25,000 people, through his efforts to revive the proposal for a treaty to ban the production of more plutonium and highly-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, and ending with the beginning of a collaboration with a group of Gorbachev’s advisors to end the Cold War. It also includes his and his colleagues’ engagement in the successful effort to end the US government’s promotion of of a nuclear weapons material, plutonium, as a nuclear fuel, and a failed effort to require the doubling of the average fuel efficiency of US automobiles.

In this part, von Hippel starts by briefly describing his family background, his education and his pursuit of a career in theoretical physics. He then describes the beginning of his engagement with policy issues as a result of the student protests and activism while he was an assistant professor at Stanford University and a fellow at the University of California Berkeley during 1966-70. This resulted in the book, Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena, co-authored with one of his students. A spin-off article in Science magazine on “Public-Interest Science” resulted in a one-year fellowship at the National Academy of Sciences during which he organized the American Physical Society’s 1974 summer study on nuclear reactor safety, which facilitated his transition into a career in nuclear policy analysis at Princeton University.

The Biden administration can take two pragmatic, achievable steps upon entering office to enhance US and allied security through arms control policy. First is to extend New START, the treaty limiti...

James Cameron seeks to explain the development of United States nuclear strategy and the emergence of strategic arms control throughout the 1960s in The Double Game. Yet, whilst the book’s title im...

In this comprehensive and ambitious book, which is based on the author’s dissertation at the University of Hamburg, Ulrich Kuhn sets out to explain the decay of US-Soviet/Russian cooperative arms c...

After the golden age of arms control, Russia and the United States are no longer engaged in arms control negotiations. The landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was officially terminated on 2 August 2019, and the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires in February 2021. The continued political alienation between Russia and the West, combined with new military-technological developments, will undermine strategic stability. A new arms race is looming with severe implications for global nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, and regional stability. Neither superpower seems to have a strategy for developing arms control and disarmament. On the contrary, both sides are pursuing costly programs to replace and modernize their Cold War strategic arsenals. A more ambitious approach is necessary for further reductions in nuclear arsenals and the extension of long-standing arms control commitments. The collapse of the INF Treaty could have been prevented by reciprocal inspections to verify treaty compliance. The United States and Russia can agree to extend New START to 2026 and to undertake a wider and structured discussion about what they could do to enhance strategic stability. Such a model must take into account third-country actors, missile defense, precision-guided conventional strike systems, and future actions in outer space and cyberspace. NATO and Russia need to launch a substantive dialogue on how to reduce the risk of hazardous military activities and to prevent military escalation caused by accidents and miscalculations. Other nuclear-armed states and their different types of delivery systems must be part of the disarmament process.

During his first year in office President Reagan sought to authorize the sale of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), an advanced weapons system, to Saudi Arabia over strong con...

Whereas much of the debate about the demise of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has focused on the European context and Russia’s alleged treaty violations, Asia looms large i...

Legacy Cold War-era arms control is collapsing and a nuclear arms race is threatening to return.

This article traces and analyzes the development of South Korea’s first ballistic-missile system from 1971 through 1978 based on memoirs and personal accounts by scientists and officials di...

Many observers anticipate “arms races” between states seeking to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in diverse military applications, some of which raise concerns on ethical and legal grounds, or ...

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983Marc Ambinder. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. $27.00. 364 pp.The Control Agenda: A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation TalksMatt...

The current US nuclear modernization program departs in several major ways from longstanding US nuclear policy: It elevates the role of nuclear weapons in US national security strategy, includes pl...

The end of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has the potential to plunge Europe and NATO into deep crisis. Russia’s continued violation coupled with the Donald J. Trum...

The study of arms control over the past century is replete with hundreds of books and reports which examined the need for, negotiation of, verification of, and continuation of arms control treaties...

In this interview with Bulletin editor-in-chief John Mecklin, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation expert Jon Wolfsthal provides his wide-ranging views on the current nuclear situation, how th...

In this interview, Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins talks about her work on arms control and nuclear security and discusses differences between the Obama and Trump administrations on issues including nuclear weapons modernization and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. She highlights the scarcity of women and people of color in national security, explains why that matters, and describes how the organization she founded last year – Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation – is working to diversify the field.

The article discusses the disconnect between arms control and disarmament practices vis-a-vis peacebuilding practices. It critically analyzes Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) pr...