LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD TODAY, #1082, Tuesday, (10/21/2025)

“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity.” ~llaw

Oct 21, 2025

LLAW’s All Things Nuclear Concerns: What’s New and Important in the Nuclear World and What to do About It!

Weekly Opinion Coming Monday, October 27, 2025 . . . (If we make it that far.)

Thought for today: We are in trouble and the problem is more human than nuclear . . . The “King” has no clothes and is tearing down our White House because he thinks he owns it.

Today’s Feature Story from LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD TODAY is from . . .

Nuclear War

NEWS

An introduction to the Harvard Kennedy School’s anti-nuclear program . . . ~llaw

Harvard Kennedy School | Harvard Kennedy School

Inside the Kennedy School’s long fight to prevent nuclear catastrophe

For generations, the insights and engagement of Kennedy School scholars have strengthened nuclear strategies and reduced dangers.

EVEN AS THE SMOKE AND ASH still wafted from the World Trade Center ruins in lower Manhattan in the days and weeks after the al-Qaida attacks in 2001, counter-terrorism specialists in the United States rushed to ask what form terror might take next: Chemical weapons? Biological attacks? One fear loomed above the others: that terrorists could get their hands on enough fissile material to make their own crude nuclear bombs—and threaten whole cities with devastation.

Researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs had already spent years weighing the potential threats and trying to raise that alarm. The 9/11 attacks galvanized policymakers to listen. Matthew Bunn, now leader of the center’s Project on Managing the Atom, had worked in the White House before coming to Harvard and grasped the politics of policy as well as the underlying science. He conceived a U.S. program to secure poorly guarded fissile material in many countries.

That work took shape, and through the resulting Global Threat Reduction Initiative, governments locked down or removed more than four tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, ensuring that those deadly materials could never be weaponized. Many countries switched their medical and other nonmilitary facilities to use safer low-enriched uranium that could not be used in bombs. The United States alone spent as much as $500 million a year on this work over more than a decade. In 2016, President Obama applauded the progress: “By working together, our nations have made it harder for terrorists to get their hands on nuclear material. We have measurably reduced the risk.”

That was just one of the many ways that Kennedy School scholars have helped prevent nuclear catastrophe. Meghan O’Sullivan, the Belfer Center’s current director, says, “Our scholars and practitioners have shaped treaties, secured stockpiles, and trained generations of leaders. This work is as urgent today as at any point in the last eighty years.”

“The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger. What a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune.”

Thomas Schelling, 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

HKS faculty, alumni, and fellows have advised presidents, responded to global security crises and threats, and filled top nuclear security roles in many governments and organizations; they have raised potential solutions through research and have convened gatherings of nuclear policy brainpower; they have challenged accepted approaches to nuclear security policy; they have contributed to the elimination of thousands of nuclear weapons; and they have made the world a safer place, limiting the risk of nuclear war and disaster.

And now, with renewed urgency, these Kennedy School experts are taking on fresh initiatives on core themes such as nonproliferation and nuclear deterrence. They are responding to fast-evolving new dangers from Russia and its war on Ukraine, Pakistan and India, Iran, and North Korea; and increasingly they are focusing on the world’s third nuclear weapons superpower, China.

“The curtain is rising on another era in which these will be much livelier questions, and there’s all the more need for places that actually do this work,” says Graham Allison, the founding dean of the modern Kennedy School and former director of the Belfer Center, who has been a renowned policy analyst on nuclear security since the 1970s. “Avoiding nuclear war is a necessary condition for pursuing any other objective,” he says. “This is not a problem to be solved, but a situation to be managed. And as technologies and geopolitics change, each generation has to manage it. Helping clarify that challenge and connecting with governments to meet it has been one of the bright red lines running through the Belfer Center and the Kennedy School.”

The Cold War era: Roots of nuclear policy impact

As the Cold War deepened in the 1950s, the specter of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States preoccupied Harvard Professor Paul Doty, who as a young biochemist had worked on the Manhattan Project, which invented nuclear weapons. Doty traveled to Russia 42 times over the decades—he took pride in counting—to build relationships with Soviet scientists and to generate ideas in what were called Track Two (non-government) talks on ways to avoid nuclear confrontation. Doty advised Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon on nuclear weapons policy, and his ideas contributed to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. That was part of the first U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I, which sought to slow the nuclear arms race by limiting offensive and defensive long-range weapon systems.

Doty was motivated by a 1955 manifesto from scientist Albert Einstein and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell on the horrors of hydrogen bombs: “It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for a majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration,” it read. “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

In response, Doty built up what became the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a base for Harvard expertise on nuclear policy, initially supported by McGeorge Bundy, then the president of the Ford Foundation. Doty recruited faculty and research fellows who took that nuclear policy work forward for decades and continue those objectives today.

As chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, Doty joined in creating the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a channel for ongoing unofficial communication among Soviet and Western scientists and arms control experts with this stated goal: “to build dialogue across divides.” Nearly 40 years later, in 1995, the Pugwash organization shared the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts on nuclear disarmament and is still working today to rid the world of nuclear arms.

Keeping the cold peace: Deterrence and detente

The Kennedy School’s impact on nuclear deterrence goes back to Thomas Schelling, an economist who helped shape U.S. government policy and academic thinking on nuclear weapons and the danger of nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s. After working in the White House, Schelling joined the Harvard faculty in 1958 and was among the founders of the modern Kennedy School. He won the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics for his application of “game theory” to strategies on issues including nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. Schelling developed policy-shaping theories of brinksmanship and “signaling” between the United States and the Soviet Union to make their intentions clear and avoid catastrophic misperceptions.

Schelling was among the faculty stars who took part in the Harvard-MIT Joint Arms Control Seminar, which ran for more than a decade and developed some of the seminal ideas that informed early arms control strategies at the height of the Cold War nuclear arms race. He began his Nobel Prize acceptance speech this way: “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger. What a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune.”

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said that Schelling’s view “permeated civilian leadership under [President] Kennedy to a remarkable degree.” Schelling’s ideas on “the subtle tension … between conflict and cooperation” sparked innovations including the “hotline” connecting the Kremlin and the White House. This text-based data line was opened after the Cuban Missile Crisis and was used in several later Cold War crises, including the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East, when President Johnson alerted the Soviets about potentially alarming U.S. fleet movements in the region. The two countries exchanged 20 hotline messages during that tense showdown before a ceasefire ended hostilities.

Alongside Doty and Schelling, Graham Allison oversaw the School’s impact on an array of nuclear security policy issues. Allison made an early academic mark with his seminal 1971 book, “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.” As HKS dean and later as leader of the Belfer Center, he followed Doty’s practice of bringing a stream of practitioners to the School as professors of practice and senior fellows. Many had worked in government—as Allison himself did, taking breaks from Harvard to hold senior posts at the Pentagon in the Reagan and Clinton administrations.

In an appreciation of Schelling, Allison wrote: “In the months that followed the missile crisis, the Kennedy Administration sponsored a surge of initiatives that reduced the risk of accidents, unauthorized launches, misperceptions, and misunderstandings. These included … signing the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, placing electronic locks on warheads (permissive action links, or PALs), and beginning negotiations that in time established the Nonproliferation Treaty. The conceptual foundation for deadly adversaries to cooperate in finding ways to nonetheless constrain their competition was largely laid by Tom.”

Joseph Nye, the renowned Harvard political analyst who coined the terms “soft power” and “smart power,” was another exemplar of the School’s path to policy influence. A former HKS dean and Belfer Center director, he both studied and managed nuclear policy issues throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Nye held top positions in the State Department and the Pentagon during stints away from Harvard. In an interview in April shortly before his death at the age of 88, Nye recalled that when he was in charge of nuclear proliferation policy for President Carter in the late 1970s, he often consulted Doty and Al Carnesale, another former HKS dean and nuclear security veteran: “So there was a direct input of academia to policy. And the policy made some difference.”

Nye noted that President Kennedy had expected the world to have 15 to 25 nuclear weapons states by the mid-1970s. “We didn’t solve the problem completely,” he said, “but we did slow it down, and today there are only nine [nuclear-armed] countries. So, I think the nonproliferation policy did make a difference, and you can make a case that [the Kennedy School] contributed in that direct transmission belt.”

Still, Nye said, “the clearest way of carrying an idea into a government is inside a skull.” Moving between the academic world and the policy world, he suggested, is a sure way to get your ideas into play—as is training students and fellows who take their ideas into governments.

Nye, Carnesale, and Allison worked together during the 1980s on the “Avoiding Nuclear War Project,” holding conferences and publishing books including “Living with Nuclear Weapons.” In 1985 they co-edited “Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War” on the pathways to nuclear war and how policymakers might move back from the brink.

“Perhaps the most important thing we did was train a series of younger scholars who became major players in the government on nuclear issues,” Nye said. Ivo Daalder went on to become ambassador to NATO, and Jim Miller became undersecretary of defense, and Kurt Campbell became deputy secretary of state. “So there were a whole series of people who became influential on government policy relating to nuclear weapons who came up through this Avoiding Nuclear War Project.”

The 1990s: Navigating nuclear dangers after the fall of the Soviet Union

Perhaps the best-known example of HKS impact on real-world problems came in 1991. That’s when Professor Ashton Carter, a physicist, took the lead in what became the Kennedy School’s signature contribution to global nuclear security. As the Soviet Union began cracking that summer, Carter recognized the looming dangers well before others did. He led a group of HKS scientists and policy experts in analyzing the potential threats posed by the vast Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals in Russia and other Soviet republics.

In late 1991, Carter’s team raised the alarm through a quickly produced, plain-language report. They briefed White House and congressional leaders on the threat, catching the attention of Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn. The two senators spearheaded bipartisan legislation—which Carter helped draft—that created the Nunn-Lugar Act’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program to help secure and dismantle former Soviet weapons of mass destruction.

Belfer Center researcher Steven Miller worked closely with Carter to develop and promote this “loose nukes” initiative; he recalls stuffing envelopes alongside Carter in the autumn of 1991 with the report that he and Carter coauthored, “Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union,” so they could rush it to congressional leaders and staff. It proved decisive in getting Nunn-Lugar enacted in December 1991.

This effort committed $400 million a year for work in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and former Soviet satellite states that included the dismantling of not just nuclear warheads but also the missile systems and nuclear submarines that might deliver them. A U.S. scorecard of the impact says the Nunn-Lugar program eliminated more than 7,000 warheads in the countries of the former Soviet Union, and destroyed several thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles, missile silos, and mobile launchers. The program also removed tons of chemical and biological weapons materials. And 22,000 Soviet nuclear scientists were placed in civilian jobs so that they wouldn’t be tempted to sell their services to nefarious buyers.

A spinoff project conceived by MIT Professor Thomas Neff resulted in the United States purchasing weapons-grade uranium from Russian warheads that was turned into fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants—the Megatons to Megawatts Program—thus lighting up American homes with power from erstwhile Soviet nuclear bombs for many years.

Carter took a leave from Harvard to join the incoming Clinton administration in 1993 as assistant secretary of defense for international security, with oversight of the new Nunn-Lugar Program. He guided the program in the early years and worked closely with Lugar and Nunn in the removal of nuclear weapons from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Carter moved back and forth from Cambridge to Washington and held a series of national security policy positions—culminating in his service under President Obama as secretary of defense from 2015 to 2017. He returned to Harvard and again led the Belfer Center until his sudden death in 2022 at the age of 68.

Miller, meanwhile, has remained a quiet hero of the Belfer Center’s work on nuclear security policy for nearly 50 years. He arrived at HKS in 1977 as a postdoctoral fellow. As the editor of International Security, which Doty founded in 1975, Miller built it into the most-cited academic journal in its field. Miller also directs the center’s International Security Program and partners with Bunn on nuclear policy work. He remains active in Pugwash as an executive committee member and takes part in its Track Two talks between nongovernment specialists from potential adversary countries, most recently with counterparts in China, Russia, and Iran.

In 1996, John Holdren, a theoretical physicist and expert on nuclear weapons and arms control, climate, and energy policy, was recruited to the Kennedy School to run the environment and energy policy program. Holdren was an adviser to President Clinton, and Bunn was a staffer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; they had worked closely on a classified government study of the loose nukes problem and potential solutions. Holdren persuaded Bunn to come to Harvard with him to work on a new nuclear security initiative—called the Project on Managing the Atom (MtA).

Nearly 30 years after he left U.S. government service and came to Harvard, Bunn is now the James R. Schlesinger Professor of the Practice of Energy, National Security and Foreign Policy, and director of the MtA program. He and his small team are still influencing nuclear security policy choices in many countries.

Before coming to Harvard, Holdren was a Pugwash leader, serving as chair for a decade, and he gave the acceptance speech for its 1995 Nobel Peace Prize (with Miller attending, as a senior Pugwash member). Holdren took leave from Harvard to serve as President Obama’s science adviser. He is now a Harvard research professor and remains co-director of the Belfer Center’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program.

Holdren is an eloquent if so-far unsuccessful advocate of a “no first-use policy”—getting nuclear-armed nations to commit not to use the weapons first in any conflict. As Holdren wrote recently: “Declaring a policy and posture of no first use of nuclear weapons offers the most conspicuous opportunity not yet taken for the United States to devalue the currency of nuclear weapons in world affairs.”

“There is widespread agreement that, in addition to sensible policy, the world has avoided nuclear war through a large measure of luck—and there is no way of knowing how long that luck will last.”

Matthew Bunn

The 2000s: The 9/11 attacks—and new nuclear security fears

Before and after 9/11, Allison, Bunn, Miller, and others at Belfer raised warnings about the dangers of unsecured nuclear materials—some weapons-usable—scattered around the world in poorly guarded sites. The Sept. 11 terror attacks made clear that the threat involved not just nuclear-armed nations but also non-state actors such as al-Qaida and other potential proliferators. President Obama read and was moved to action by Allison’s book, “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.” Bunn’s “Securing the Bomb” series of reports helped galvanize action. In this climate, Bunn was able to advance what became the Global Threat Reduction Initiative as an outgrowth of the nuclear security work under the Nunn-Lugar initiative.

Recognizing the changing risks, President Obama pulled together a series of Nuclear Security Summits starting in 2010, which were attended by more than 50 world leaders. Bunn offered suggestions to the host governments for all four summits, working with Gary Samore, who had earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard and was then Obama’s “weapons of mass destruction czar,” and Laura Holgate, a senior U.S. diplomat and former Belfer Center staffer who led the summit planning at the White House. The first summit approved a four-year effort to secure vulnerable materials worldwide—an idea Bunn had suggested. Through this process, many countries committed to steps such as reducing stockpiles of radioactive materials and tightening controls against insider threats.

Samore came back to Harvard as the Belfer Center research executive director in 2013 and was the lead author of the center’s “Iran Nuclear Deal: A Definitive Guide,” a handbook for policymakers suggested by Graham Allison. The booklet became required reading for congressional staff in the debate over the 2015 agreement (since abrogated by President Trump). Samore, now at Brandeis University, remains a Belfer Center senior visiting fellow.

“Our scholars and practitioners have shaped treaties, secured stockpiles, and trained generations of leaders. This work is as urgent today as at any point in the last eighty years.”

Meghan O’Sullivan

In the past decade, the nuclear policy landscape has further shifted from the era when many political leaders felt the threat of nuclear annihilation had subsided thanks to the global dominance of the United States and its friendly relations with newly democratic Russia.

“Everybody thought, oh well, that problem’s done, and the nuclear experts sort of got shoved to the side of the serious foreign policy conversation,” says Bunn. “Then, with the rise again of great power competition and really intense hostility between the United States and Russia, between the United States and China, between the United States and North Korea and North Korea’s development of missiles that can reach the U.S. homeland, people started realizing, ‘Whoa, wait a minute: Avoiding nuclear war is actually a key thing that we need to be designing our foreign policy around.’”

The 2020s: New initiatives to meet fast-changing nuclear risks

In November 2024, Meghan O’Sullivan, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and director of the Belfer Center, joined the leaders of two fellow institutions in launching the Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation and U.S. National Security. Along with MIT professor and former Belfer Center senior fellow Ernie Moniz of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative and Tino Cuéllar of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, O’Sullivan co-chairs this effort to bring together top U.S. security analysts and policy experts to study the drivers of proliferation with the goal to develop a nonpartisan policy roadmap for U.S. nuclear security policy.

“The risks are multiplying even as the nonproliferation architecture of the previous era degrades,” O’Sullivan notes. “The policy choices we make today will determine whether nuclear dangers grow or recede in the decades to come. This task force is about meeting that urgency.”

Today, the proliferation landscape is increasingly fraught: Iran’s program was targeted by U.S. and Israeli forces, and other Middle Eastern countries may want their own nuclear weapons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and its threat to use nuclear weapons there raised concerns in countries under the American nuclear umbrella about whether the United States will really defend them. North Korea has built dozens of nuclear weapons coupled with a wide range of missiles.

O’Sullivan has intersected with many of these issues over the years, working in the U.S. State Department after the 9/11 attacks, in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003, and as deputy national security advisor to President George W. Bush. She left government in 2007 to come to Harvard, where she leads the Geopolitics of Energy Project and has launched new efforts on the changing global order, how evolving technologies are shaping global politics, and the role of middle powers in the changing world picture.

The proliferation policy challenge includes the need to make sure that the growth and spread of nuclear energy does not contribute to the spread of nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy could play an important part in reducing carbon emissions to combat global warming if it can be produced safely, affordably, and with minimal nuclear-weapons risk.

Daniel Poneman was a Harvard undergraduate in 1975 when he became a research assistant to Al Carnesale. He went on to coordinate proliferation policy in the White House from 1990 to 1995. Under President Obama, Poneman became deputy secretary of energy, overseeing the U.S. atomic weapons arsenal as well as nuclear energy policy. After leaving government, he was chief executive of a major nuclear fuel company. Then Poneman returned to the Kennedy School as a senior fellow in 2024 to share his expertise on issues such as safer nuclear power generation. Poneman and Bunn are both members of the nonproliferation task force with O’Sullivan.

Poneman views the current global nuclear policy landscape as “the most dangerous moment since 1962,” the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “We used to think only about land, sea, and airplanes, jet bombers. But now you have to add cyberspace and outer space. Now we have to think about advanced conventional weapons and hypersonics,” he says. “The whole field has become more dangerous and more complex, at a time when arms control is effectively moribund.”

Deterrence in a higher-tech world with an emerging Big Power

Rethinking the evolving challenges of deterring nuclear war prompted another recent Kennedy School initiative: the Global Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence, launched in 2022. Francesca Giovannini, the executive director of Managing the Atom, co-directed the deterrence network project with Bunn. Most of its work has been completed, including dozens of journal articles, and a book on nuclear dangers is nearing completion. The network comprised more than 80 scholars from 15 institutions and two countries.

In a paper for his students, Bunn explains one key reason nuclear deterrence needs to be reconsidered: “The crises of the nuclear age suggest that in a crisis events can get out of control, with incidents taking place that none of the leaders of the states in the crisis intended. There is widespread agreement that, in addition to sensible policy, the world has avoided nuclear war through a large measure of luck—and there is no way of knowing how long that luck will last.”

Beyond Russia, China, as a rival with a fast-growing nuclear weapons arsenal, presents the most complex and longer-term challenge and draws especially close focus from HKS scholars. Graham Allison’s ongoing research on great power rivalries is widely cited in analyses of the intensifying U.S.–China rivalry and debates about how to mitigate it, as is his “Thucydides’ Trap” concept of the risk of war between rising and ruling powers.

Allison regularly travels to China, promoting dialogue and laying the groundwork for government discussions. Both Allison and the MtA team traveled this past summer for discussions with Chinese counterparts, which included ideas for a potential Trump-Xi summit—among them, steps to reduce nuclear dangers and limit a potential arms race. And Bunn recently briefed Trump administration officials overseeing policy work on nuclear security, just as he has done with the administrations of both parties since Bill Clinton was in office.

Bunn is a second-generation nuclear policy specialist. His father, George Bunn, was a key negotiator of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 and drafted the legislation that created the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. George Bunn mentored generations of students at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin Law School on how to bring nuclear weapons under international control. His son is doing the same at Harvard.

“Paul Doty’s vision of creating opportunities that would train and help place the emerging generations of arms control and nuclear policy people really bore fruit across time.”

Steven Miller

Matthew Bunn is careful not to overstate his Managing the Atom team’s victories in influencing policy on these issues, and he stresses that he has built on decades of prior work at the Kennedy School. But over the years, “we have had some major successes convincing not only the U.S. government but also some other governments to take action,” Bunn says. Even China? “There are at least two major rules in Chinese nuclear security regulation that I believe were adopted after workshops that we organized to explain why those rules would be important things to do.”

Bunn engages regularly and directly. In 2024, he made the case in a talk in Beijing that it was in China’s national interest to restrain its nuclear arms building and avoid an arms race with the United States. The deputy director of strategic studies at the school of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Fan Jishe, heard Bunn speak and asked him to write up his talk for a scholarly journal Fan helps edit. Bunn’s article, “Opportunities for U.S.-China nuclear tension reduction,” appeared in January. (Fan was once a Belfer Center research fellow in the Project on Managing the Atom.)

The Managing the Atom team has included the physicist Hui Zhang as a senior research associate since 1999. First trained in China, he leads an initiative assessing China’s policies and nuclear weapons buildup as well as its approaches to security for nuclear facilities and to nuclear energy. His forthcoming book explores the technical history of Chinese nuclear weapons development and testing.

Building an HKS nuclear policy talent pipeline

Bunn and other HKS scholars and practitioners have stepped up their pace on research, learning, and events to think through these fast-evolving risks of nuclear confrontation. The Project on Managing the Atom brings together colleagues and government officials from Russia, China, Europe, South Asia, and beyond to debate these issues and weigh options.

The MtA project is based in the School’s Belfer Center, where security policy programs since 1973 have trained more than 1,700 practitioners and scholars from around the world, along with countless Kennedy School graduate students. Many become security leaders in their countries—and some return to the Kennedy School as fellows to teach the next generation of specialists.

Steven Miller and Bunn host weekly seminars with Harvard graduate students and fellows in the MtA and International Security programs—candid conversations that draw the world’s leading policy experts as speakers. Miller reflects: “Paul Doty’s vision of creating opportunities that would train and help place the emerging generations of arms control and nuclear policy people really bore fruit across time.”

That tradition has never slowed. Ivo Daalder has returned to the Belfer Center as a senior fellow. Wendy Sherman, a former Belfer fellow and director of the HKS Center for Public Leadership, was deputy secretary of state under President Biden; her diplomatic career included nuclear security negotiations with Iran and North Korea. On her team as undersecretary for international security and arms control was Bonnie Jenkins, a former MtA fellow. Vipin Narang, another former MtA fellow, served as acting assistant secretary of defense charged with nuclear weapons policy.

Looking to a murky future and avoiding Armageddon

In recent years, the nuclear weapons landscape has grown steadily darker. Only one treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear forces remains. When the New START Treaty expires in February 2026, the world will be without any limit on nuclear arms competition for the first time since 1972. This shift coincides with huge investments in upgrading weapons arsenals in the United States, Russia, and China—the opposite of the gradual disarmament envisioned in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons.

At the same time, nearly 80 years into the Kennedy School’s work on nuclear arms control, deterrence, and nonproliferation, the world today has thousands fewer nuclear weapons, more channels for communicating in crises, and just nine nuclear weapons nations, not 15 or 50. Most important, that one worst outcome—a nuclear bomb attack—has not recurred since World War II. As Thomas Schelling said, the most important development of the last half century is something that didn’t happen—despite all the crises, near misses, and nuclear tensions that have led us to the brink.

That is partly to the credit of generations of Kennedy School thinkers and doers. And it is work that continues to this day. These experts have leaned into teaching, research, and engagement with policymakers that drove monumental nuclear treaties; built new understandings of decision-making and leadership in crises; fostered prize-winning dialogues with potential enemies; and slowed the proliferation of nuclear weapons to rogue governments and terrorists.

As Graham Allison put it, the work is informed by Ronald Reagan’s “incandescent one liner: ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’” That idea has been foundational to thinking about how nuclear powers can live with one another, because they can’t fight it out in a nuclear war, Allison said. And that in turn recalls President Kennedy’s 1963 challenge in a speech at American University:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

(Former Belfer Center staff member Sharon Wilke contributed reporting for this article.)

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Featured inline images:

HKS scholars led by Ash Carter helped forge the program that kept the world safe from “loose nukes” as the Soviet Union came apart at the end of the Cold War.

Kennedy School faculty and fellows engage nuclear policy leaders, bringing them to the HKS campus and reaching out to them across the world.

Photos by Getty Images or courtesy of the Belfer Center; portraits by Martha Stewart and HKS archives

TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS, Tuesday, (10/21/2025)

About Today’s Nuclear News and How it Works:

There are 7 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcano and caldera activity around the world that also play an important role in the survival of human and other life.

The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). If there was no news from a Category today, the Category will not appear. The Categories are listed below in their usual order:

All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Nuclear War
Yellowstone Caldera
IAEA News (Friday’s only)

A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.

Today’s Nuclear World News

All Things Nuclear

NEWS

Furloughs start at nuclear security agency amid government shutdown – KMBC

KMBC

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the U.S. nuclear stockpile will be secure, but experts say there are national security implications.

Furloughs start at nuclear security agency amid government shutdown – KCRA

KCRA

“All of these things need constant monitoring and safe handling. Releases of any radioactive materials could be very dangerous. So that is the …

Kansas could get more nuclear reactors. Here are 6 things to know about the proposals

KCUR

This screengrab from a TerraPower video illustrates the company’s nuclear power plant design. Two companies are pursuing two very different visions ..

Nuclear Power

NEWS

US to expedite nuclear–powered subs to Australia that will sit near China’s doorstep

Fox News

In the agreement, known as AUKUS, the U.S. will sell up to five Virginia-class nuclear–powered submarines to Australia — slated for delivery as soon …

Trump affirms support for nuclear sub deal – POLITICO

Politico

President Donald Trump on Monday insisted the U.S. is going “full steam ahead” on a major nuclear–powered submarine pact, ending months of …

Amazon goes nuclear with new modular reactor plant – New Atlas

New Atlas

Learn why Amazon is building X-Energy Xe-100 small modular reactors (SMRs) near Richland, WA. This Generation IV nuclear technology will safeguard …

Nuclear Power Emergencies

NEWS

Hutchinson Explores Hosting Next-Generation Nuclear Power Facility to Boost Economic Growth

KCLY Radio

… nuclear power facility to Hutchinson, which … Kansas’ Angee Morgan Honored with National Emergency Management’s Top Distinguished Service Award.

Palisades moving closer to start-up | Newsradio WOOD 1300 and 106.9 FM – iHeart

Newsradio WOOD 1300 and 106.9 FM – iHeart

The Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township, is moving closer … The plant’s emergency plan is fully active, supported by a trained Emergency …

Nuclear War Threats

NEWS

Can missile defence against nuclear attack work? – ICAN

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

… threats it is designed to counter and the range it would cover … How can we best protect ourselves from the threat of nuclear war? The …

Inside the Kennedy School’s long fight to prevent nuclear catastrophe

Harvard Kennedy School

… nuclear deterrence. They are responding to fast-evolving new dangers from Russia and its war on Ukraine, Pakistan and India, Iran, and North Korea …

Threatens to SHOOT DOWN Putin’s Plane Ahead of Trump Meet | WW3 – YouTube

YouTube

… threat intensifies diplomatic tensions, putting pressure on European … ‘Nuclear War…’: Iran’s Khamenei Thrashes President Trump; Warns …