Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs - Chemical and biological weapons

Options for Action in Syria

Chuck Freilich — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:42:51 -0500

"...[E]ven the limited use of chemical weapons violates a fundamental international norm and an American failure to respond would create another North Korea–like precedent that would be a source of deep encouragement for the Assads of the world: WMD buys even a heinous regime immunity from international retaliation. Iran is no doubt watching in the wings, deriving its own conclusions regarding what the U.S. defines as unacceptable behavior."

Out on a Presidential Limb

Charles G. Cogan — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:56:36 -0500

"...[I]n the event of a worst-case scenario in which negotiations completely fail, Barack Obama has committed himself to an unprovoked military attack on Iran, which would have a disastrous effect on world public opinion and lead to unpredictable human and material damage."

Obama's leadership challenge on Syria

Nicholas Burns — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:39:56 -0500

The US can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines in Syria, writes Professor Burns in this week's GlobalPost piece. The stakes and consequences are just too high to do otherwise.

Spotlight on Gary Samore

James F. Smith — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 07:39:10 -0500

In the complex world of the United States government, it’s rare for a lone White House official to oversee a real change in direction on a major policy issue. Gary Samore not only helped reshape U.S. policy on one issue; he did so with two immense national security challenges during his four years as President Obama’s Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control.

Iran and Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Military Dynamics of Nonproliferation

Mansour Salsabili — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:56:18 -0500

Ambiguity in Iran's weapon acquisition dynamics exacerbates mistrust, which is the core reason for the present standoff at the negotiating table. This paper elucidates the Iranian military's capability and intention by delving into the main componential elements of weapon acquisition.

Renewing Dialogue with Israel

Chuck Freilich — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:58:55 -0500

"The most pressing issue on the agenda is a collapsing Syria and the increasingly realistic danger that it may, in extremis, use chemical weapons against its civilian population, or Israel. Recent indications have created the worrisome impression that the administration is focused on ways of responding to a Syrian use of such weapons, rather than preventing them from being used."

President Obama's WMD "Czar" Appointed Executive Director of Belfer Center

James F. Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:19:27 -0600

Gary Samore, President Obama’s Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control, has been appointed Executive Director (Research) for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A former fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program, Samore has served for the past four years as the principal advisor to the President on all matters relating to arms control and the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and WMD terrorism.

A Syrian Way Out of the Civil War

David Ignatius — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:47:43 -0600

"To help oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an opposition group has drafted a plan for a transitional justice system that would impose harsh penalties against die-hard members of his inner circle but provide amnesty for most of his Alawite supporters.

The goal is to provide a legal framework that reassures Alawites this isn’t a fight to the death and that they will have a place in a post-Assad Syria. The plan would also encourage the rule of law in areas that have been liberated from Assad’s control, stemming the growing trend toward warlordism and revenge killings," writes David Ignatius for the Washington Post.

A Defector's Account of Syrian Chemical Weapons on the Move

David Ignatius — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:37:55 -0600

"Reports from inside two Syrian chemical weapons facilities offer chilling new evidence that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime developed special vehicles last year for moving and mixing the weapons — and an unconfirmed allegation that Lebanese allies of the regime, presumably in Hezbollah, may have been trained 11 months ago in the weapons’ use," writes Future of Diplomacy Project senior fellow David Ignatius.

WMD Free Zone in Mideast: An Opportunity for Detente with Iran

Tytti Erästö — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:05:24 -0500

"The P5+1 and Iran should take note of the fact that there is a new window opening, and try to make most of it. The new opportunity comes in the form of a historic conference for the establishment of a weapons of mass destruction free zone (WMDFZ) in the Middle East—a conference which will be held in Finland in the coming December. What is special about this opportunity is that it allows Iran and the P5+1 to step outside of the negative dynamics created by their previous interactions, and to approach the nuclear issue from a different perspective."

Managing the Endgame in Syria

Chuck Freilich — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 14:25:47 -0500

"...[I]t increasingly looks like a new regime may be as unsavory as its predecessor and may threaten the four decades of calm that have prevailed on the Golan Heights. The danger of escalation is great, especially if Syria, or its Iranian and Hezbollah allies, in a desperate attempt to save itself in its final extremis, seek to divert attention from their shared problems by using Syria's vast chemical arsenal against Israel, Syria's own citizens, or international players, should they seek to intervene. A long-established rule of dictatorship is that an external crisis is always a good means of deflecting attention from domestic challenges."

The Darker Side of the Bio Industry

Juliette Kayyem — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:42:38 -0500

"...[O]ne of the fundamental challenges for scientists today is how to communicate basic and vital safety information about the threats we face....Numerical scales work....The public does not need to grasp all the details of the science behind changes to the scale. It just needs a way to know, and process, what is normal, heightened, and extreme danger. This is particularly true given that biological threats are invisible, causing a type of fear distinct from those we can feel or see."

International Security: Vol. 36. No. 4.

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:02:02 -0500

International Security is America’s leading journal of security affairs. It provides sophisticated analyses of contemporary security issues and discusses their conceptual and historical foundations. The journal is edited at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and published quarterly by the MIT Press. Questions may be directed to IS@Harvard.edu.

Paul Doty's Legacy Lives on Through Influential Journal

James F. Smith — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:09:03 -0500

As soon as Paul Doty launched what is now Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1974, he began planning a scholarly journal on international security. He shrugged off colleagues’ concerns that there would be little market for such a journal.Thirty-six years after the first issue appeared in the summer of 1976, the Belfer Center’s quarterly International Security consistently ranks No. 1 or No. 2 out of over 70 international affairs journals surveyed by Thomson Reuters each year.

Stopping the Clock

Juliette Kayyem — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:17:40 -0600

"...[W]hen the smart scientists decided to add global warming and biological harms to the clock's matrix in 2007, their previous laser focus on nuclear Armageddon lost its impact. Their explanation of why things have gotten one minute worse is a laundry list that includes nuclear proliferation, Iran, Japan's nuclear disaster and its effects on nuclear power investments, carbon emissions, and virulent strains of viruses that can be used for lethal purposes."

Security vs. Scourge

Juliette Kayyem — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:55:29 -0600

"...[T]he board is made up of scientists and has no enforcement power. The government does, and the board’s position should be seen as a plea to the journals to avoid a showdown with national-security officials who are understandably concerned with biological weapons. The absence of a globally enforceable Biological Weapons Convention (the United States withdrew its support in 2001) means that each nation, individually, must monitor itself."

Comrades, we're in a defensive arms race with Russia-- but it isn't a bad thing.

Kevin Ryan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:39:45 -0600

Russian leaders have previously promised to improve the survivability of their offensive nuclear missile force as a means of ensuring that they would retain an effective nuclear deterrent, and that will likely happen. But recent events and announcements indicate that Russia is also investing money in its own increased missile defenses.

Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise

Sharon Weiner — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:59:10 -0600

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers feared that terrorists and rogue states would obtain weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or knowledge about how to build them from the vast Soviet nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons complex. The United States launched a major effort to prevent former Soviet WMD experts, suddenly without salaries, from peddling their secrets. In Our Own Worst Enemy, Sharon Weiner chronicles the design, implementation, and evolution of four U.S. programs that were central to this nonproliferation policy and assesses their successes and failures.

Winner of the 2012 Louis Brownlow Book Award

Terrorist Threat Demands Creative Intelligence

Dominic Contreras — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:07:14 -0600

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, argues that despite not falling victim to a major terrorist event in the last 10 years, the United States must not be complacent in its counter-terrorism efforts. Mowatt-Larssen said in a Belfer Center seminar in September that he believes the possibility of a major attack is higher in the next 10 years than in the preceding decade.

Terrorist Threat Demands Creative Intelligence

Dominic Contreras — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:08:05 -0500

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, argues that despite not falling victim to a major terrorist event in the last ten years, the United States must not be complacent in its counter-terrorism efforts. Mowatt-Larssen, a Belfer Center senior fellow, said in a seminar at the Center that he believes the possibility of a major attack is higher in the next ten years than in the preceding decade.

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The Future of U.S. Nuclear Policy: The Case for No First Use

Michael S. Gerson — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:13:18 -0600

"NFU would provide the United States with important political benefits in its efforts to lead the nonproliferation regime and encourage greater international support for nonproliferation initiatives. Many nonnuclear member states of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) often base their lack of support for U.S.-led multilateral nonproliferation initiatives on the grounds that the United States has not done enough to fulfill its obligation to Article 6 of the NPT, which commits the declared nuclear states to disarmament."

Assessing Obama’s Nuclear Summit

Graham Allison — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:45:07 -0500

"This summit was Act One. Other governments are most likely to take the actions required when their leaders feel in their guts that a loose nuclear weapon in their country could be used to blow up the city in which they live."

Biosecurity Reconsidered: Calibrating Biological Threats and Responses

Gregory Koblentz — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:37:10 -0500

March 31, 2010

The risks posed by biological threats are increasing, and biosecurity has risen higher on the international security agenda. Yet the lack of a common definition of biosecurity, the range of biological threats, and differences of opinion over the most important threats hinder the development of effective bioterrorism counterstrategies. A definition that includes naturally occurring, accidental, and deliberate disease outbreaks, combined with a taxonomy of threats that identifies the sources of and groups at risk for biological threats, would help policymakers assess and manage these risks, prevent and respond to biological threats, and further biosecurity research.

The Armageddon Test

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:23:48 -0500

How much nuclear material has leaked, and is it in the hands of terrorists, in storage somewhere, or still in circulation? No one knows for sure, but the task of cleaning up the nuclear black market amounts to an Armageddon test for global intelligence. The standard for success is unforgiving: all nuclear material must be recovered before it finds its way into an improvised nuclear device.

Iran's Nuclear Deception

William H. Tobey — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:48:25 -0500

"We probably will never know whether the case of the found enriched uranium was a mistake or a feint. That uncertainty, however, and the horrible consequences of a significant lapse in our ability to monitor Iran's nuclear program should lead the IAEA, the Obama administration, and our European negotiating partners to exercise great caution in considering proposals that would depend on intricate and foolproof verification schemes."

Panel Calls on President and Congress to Address WMD Proliferation

Sasha Talcott — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:17:09 -0500

Belfer Center director Graham Allison served on the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which released its report in December. The congressionally appointed Commission called on then President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to immediately initiate several concrete actions, unilaterally and with the international community, to address the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that pose the greatest peril: nuclear and biological weapons.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Ashton Carter Nominated as Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics

Beth Maclin and Ashton B. Carter — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:50:06 -0600

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he has nominated Dr. Ashton B. Carter to serve as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

Your Inbox, Mr. President

Matthew Meselson — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:38:25 -0600

Rejuvenate the Environmental Protection Agency. End the stem-cell ban. Re engage with the UN on climate change. Six leading voices tell Nature what the new US president needs to do to move beyond the Bush legacy.

Key Takeaways from Report of the Congressionally-established Bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism

Graham Allison — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:26:45 -0600

December 22, 2008

The Bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (established by Congress) recently delivered its report to the leaders of Congress, President Bush, and the Obama-Biden transition team. Graham Allison, one of the Commissioners, outlines key takeaways from the Commission's findings.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen Named Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center

Sharon Wilke and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:25:24 -0600

December 2, 2008

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, director of the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's WMD and terrorism efforts, will join the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center as a senior fellow on January 19, 2009.