Nuclear

Experts cited the lack of intercontinental ballistic missiles in North Korea’s 70th anniversary parade celebrations over the weekend as a sign that the nuclear nation remains committed to denuclearization talks with the U.S. But in the weeks before the anniversary celebration, President Donald Trump cancelled a high-level meeting meant to ...

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he would meet Iran’s leaders “anytime they want.” The President adding that he would meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani without preconditions, and after high-profile meetings with North Korean President Kim Jung Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, reiterating that he believes meeting with adversaries ...

We know from twenty-five years of negotiations that patience and persistence are required if we hope to resolve nuclear and other issues with North Korea.  We also know that North Korea wants a normal relationship with the U.S., ideally they’d like to retain nuclear weapons and  have access to international ...

OPINION -- President Trump’s repeated message that Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons requires him to have better relations with Vladimir Putin, should encourage China to sharply increase the size of its strategic nuclear forces. That’s the message in an article entitled, “China can learn from Trump’s Russia stance,” carried in ...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s comments on Sunday about Iran and its leadership ignited a war of words between the U.S. and Iran with President Trump weighing in via Twitter, warning Iran not to threaten the U.S., but how far-reaching will the impact of their words be? Pompeo accused Iran’s ...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is resetting expectations for a denuclearization timeline for North Korea, saying Monday that it will take 'decades' to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program.  In a Tweet on Monday, President Donald Trump reaffirmed his confidence in the North Korean leader, saying that he ...

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to North Korea seeking signs of progress after the recent Singapore summit,  some of his colleagues in the U.S. Intelligence community are doubting whether actions will meet up to words when it comes to North Korea's promise to denuclearize.  Ambassador Joe DeTrani has ...

Much initial reaction to the North Korean - American Singapore Summit has been negative, with critics targeting the concessions made by President Trump including; a dramatic, public endorsement of Kim Jong-un’s status and a halt to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises in exchange for North Korea’s commitment to “nuclear disarmament”, ...

OPINION: The eyes of an intelligence officer are trained to look for what a person’s behavior uncovers about his or her motivations and aspirations, which can then help predict future behavior. Watching the president’s recent actions regarding North Korea—his desperation to meet in person with Kim Jong Un, his fulsome ...

  One wonders what the alien creature Griffin, portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg in Men in Black III, and capable of seeing all possible futures, would see in the range of outcomes for the upcoming meeting between two other interesting beings who are the leaders of North Korea and the United ...

As the U.S. President prepares to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, sources tell The Cipher Brief that U.S. Special Operations Forces have been preparing for potential action against the North Korean regime for more than a year. This, as the Pentagon recently completed a sweeping review ...

The Head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization is putting the IAEA on notice that Tehran is likely to begin producing centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium.    According to the Fars news agency, Ali Akbar Salehi says the move does not violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) ...

Russia. We hear and read about it every day in the mainstream media, but the news seems almost exclusively focused on the various investigations of Russian meddling and the politics surrounding them. Russian meddling, to be sure, merits this coverage since the cyberattacks and spread of polarizing disinformation represented a ...

Bottom Line:   Pakistani citizens are heading to the polls next month in a public display of democracy and choice. Yet, with Pakistan’s military continuing to play a leading role in the country’s political affairs, it seems that the upcoming elections will once again amount to a stamp on an otherwise ...

The Trump administration has yet to make public its objectives for a North Korea denuclearization agreement, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated what it should contain during questioning by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) last Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We are looking for the complete dismantlement of ...

The array of complex threats facing the United States requires the country to prioritize managing alliances and building coalitions, former Acting Director of the CIA John McLaughlin and retired General David Petraeus told members of Congress on Wednesday. The two testified before the House Armed Services Committee at a hearing ...

North Korea is once again taking provocative actions, this time launching two ballistic missiles in which one landed for the first time in Japanese controlled waters.    Last month, North Korea fired three short-range missiles into the sea.    The latest series of tests, which violate UN resolutions, come on the heels ...

North Korea is threatening the Global Community with its reckless nuclear and missile behavior.   They have consistently disregarded U.N. Security Council Resolutions and have made clear, especially to China and the U.S., that they are a nuclear weapons state. The four nuclear tests, the most recent in 2016, have progressively ...

The next president, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, will have to make hard decisions about whether to go ahead with the current, enormously costly, U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plan, though neither has spoken about it, nor have they been seriously questioned about it. It may be just too complex for a ...

The White House and some Republicans in Congress are taking a second look at the need for, and the $1 trillion cost of, the planned, decades-long program to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and its Triad of land, sea and air delivery systems.  On May 19, the Republican-dominated House ...

On May 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepared to discuss Iranian sanctions with leading members of the European banking industry in London. However, this time Kerry came, not to urge sanctions enforcement, but to reassure European banks that they are “absolutely free to open accounts for Iran, trade ...

Although the implementation of the Iran nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in January lifted some international sanctions on Iran, many non-nuclear sanctions remain in place. As a result, the return of international investment to the country has been slower than expected, raising temperatures in ...

Since Iran signed the nuclear deal with world powers in July 2015, Tehran has seen a flood of foreign visitors. Nine heads of state, 16 foreign ministers and dozens of other senior-level officials from across the world have come looking for diplomatic deals and economic opportunities. Iran is open for ...

Last Friday, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima after the city was destroyed by an American atomic bomb on August 6 1945. Although the President did not apologize for the act, he did use the occasion to advocate nuclear nonproliferation, mourning the day when “a ...

Seventy-one years ago, on August 6, 1945, a U.S. B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140 thousand people. The bombing came at the end of a long and bloody war in which 20 million people or more died in Asia. Soon thereafter, for the first ...

Against the backdrop of an increasingly assertive China and a highly-provocative North Korea, President Barack Obama attended the G-7 summit in Ise-Shima, followed by a personal trip to Hiroshima, where he was accompanied by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In what was sure to be his last official trip to ...

A May 15 test of India’s anti-ballistic missile system fanned the flames of a nuclear standoff 45 years in the making. Pakistan voiced “serious concern” over the test that it believes could nullify its nuclear deterrent against its long standing enemy. Of the nine nuclear armed states, Pakistan and India ...

The adversarial history between India and Pakistan is compounded by each nation’s firm stance on the possession of nuclear weapons. As each country moves to expand its capabilities, it has become more important than ever before to bring both countries into agreement with international arms control norms. The Cipher Brief ...

South Asia is the region of the world at highest risk of suffering a nuclear crisis due to an explosive mixture of unresolved territorial disputes, cross-border terrorism, and growing nuclear arsenals. While the Middle East will remain a focal point for international nonproliferation efforts for the foreseeable future, the United ...

North Korea held its Seventh Workers’ Party Congress last week. The primary focus of the Congress was to consolidate Kim Jong-un’s domestic power base and clarify the policy direction for the country’s future development.  Based on the statements released from the Congress, North Korea continues to seek nuclear power status, ...

North Korea’s first Party Congress in three decades, a grand spectacle at which Kim Jong-un’s greatest achievement seems to have been giving himself the newly-created title of the chairman of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), cannot have given the long-suffering citizens of North Korea much hope for a ...

The 7th North Korean Workers’ Party (WPK) Congress --the first event of its kind in 36 years-- began and ended with the flair for the dramatic we have come to expect from the reclusive communist state. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un dialed up the party rhetoric and called on all workers ...

Constraining Iran’s missile program is a worthwhile objective, but the muddled U.S. approach of sanctions and name-calling appears less likely to contain than to promote it. In the face of recent U.S. criticism, Iranians, ranging from hardline conservatives through reform-minded officials, are more united than ever in support of what ...

The Cipher Brief: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have the technical ability to pursue nuclear weapons, but all three have refrained. What conditions would have to exist for these countries to consider nuclear programs? Tom Cynkin: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have each considered the circumstances under which they would ...

It takes a trained eye to spot the patterns in the grainy satellite images, but subtle changes like tire tracks and repositioned mine carts show renewed tunneling activity at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. North Korea has restarted excavations. Though the evidence is far from conclusive, it does match activity ...

If there was one way to emphasize the grave problem of nuclear security to the international community, South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s recent visit to Washington summed up the issue pretty well. On the fringes of the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), Park met with President Barack Obama and the leaders ...

North Korea watchers knew what to expect following Pyongyang’s 4th nuclear test on January 6th, 2016: a new round of United Nations sanctions. Known as UNSC Resolution 2270, this latest group of sanctions increases inspections on cargo vessels, limits the import of North Korean raw materials such as coal, gold, ...

With the conclusion of the final Nuclear Security Summit, Russia and the United States - the possesors of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals – are both in the midst of comprehensive nuclear weapons modernization efforts. The Cipher Brief spoke to former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia, Dr. ...

The drop in Russian state revenues has affected Russian military modernization to some extent, though the Russian government has made an effort to insulate the military from budget cuts. Although the 2015 military budget was cut by five percent mid-year, the total allocation was still 25 percent higher than the ...

At the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit, taking place Thursday and Friday in Washington, DC, President Obama will have his last chance to work toward his promised goal - set 7 years ago in Prague - to make the world safer from unsecured nuclear materials. The outcome of the ...

To optimists, it may appear that Iran is headed in a new direction. During the past year, Iranian leaders reached a landmark nuclear deal with the P5+1 and moderates emerged victorious in the country’s most recent elections in February. Yet the international community remains wary of Iran’s provocative behavior and ...

“Do you see the cornered cat?  With its tiny claws, it tears out the eyes of a leopard” --Sa’adi of Shiraz, 13th Century The last three years have brought some remarkable shifts in Iran’s political landscape: the departure of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his outrageous proclamations; a new Iranian president ...

Iran’s February 26 elections for the Majlis, or parliament, and for the Assembly of Experts, a clerically-dominated 88-member body that will select the successor to Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was hailed as a victory for Iran’s moderates and an endorsement of President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist policies. There is ...

Over four years have passed since Kim Jong-un took over the leadership of North Korea after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in late 2011. At the time, some hoped that Kim Jong-un’s young age and western education would lead him to set North Korea on a path toward ...

North Korea’s satellite launch over the weekend, on the heels of its nuclear test last month, raises the prospects of renewed tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in East Asia.  Beijing has heretofore protected Pyongyang from stricter economic sanctions.  Former U.S. foreign service officer and Northeast Asia expert, Dr. Thomas ...

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran are arguably at a historic low. Saudi Arabia has cut off diplomatic relations with Iran in response to mob violence against Saudi diplomatic facilities in Tehran and Mashhad. Those attacks were a reaction to Riyadh’s execution of a prominent Shi’a Saudi activist who had ...

Iran’s every move will be closely scrutinized by the international community now that sanctions have been lifted over its nuclear program, providing Iran access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets. Over the weekend, the International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had completed all the requirements stipulated ...

Although the sanctions on Iran have been lifted as part of the nuclear deal, former Treasury Department official Adam Smith said the U.S. will continue to impose sanctions on Iran for its terrorist, human rights, and ballistic missile activities. Smith told The Cipher Brief that one of the secondary aims ...

Speaking from the White House on the day after the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal, President Obama proudly declared “Today is a good day” demonstrating what is possible with “strong American diplomacy.”  History will determine whether the Iran deal proves to be the success its proponents already claim it ...

The year 1979 is remembered by most Americans for the takeover of the United States embassy in Tehran.  That year was pivotal for people in the region, as it marked the establishment of an Islamist government in Iran and the takeover of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by a group ...