Publication Archive

In the previous issue of the Public Interest Report (Spring 2015), Dr. Charles Ferguson’s President’s Message focused on the importance of empathy in science and security engagements. This was a most welcome surprise, as concepts such as empathy do not typically make it to the pages of technical scientific publications. Yet the social and behavioral sciences […]

Roadside bombs were devastating to American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The press has categorized the moment prior to such an explosion as “left of boom,” and that following the explosion as “right of boom.” Defense Department analyst, Benjamin E. Schwartz, has chosen to title his book about nuclear terrorism, Right of Boom. While capturing […]

General George C. Marshall and the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 2016) provides the first full narrative describing General Marshall’s crucial role in the first decade of nuclear weapons that included the Manhattan Project, the use of the atomic bomb on Japan, and their management during the early years of the Cold War. Marshall is best known today […]

Professor Rob Goldston teaches in the areas of nuclear energy and non-proliferation at Princeton University. Rob is a leading researcher in plasma physics and fusion energy. He was director of the DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), 1997 – 2009. Since then he has published on the tradeoff between climate change mitigation by nuclear energy, fission […]

Creating a Community for Global Security by Charles D. Ferguson The Iran Deal: A Pathway for North Korea? by Manit Shah and Jose Trevino The majority of all nuclear experts and diplomats, as well as aspiring nuclear and policy students, must have their eyes set on North Korea’s slowly but steadily expanding nuclear weapons program, […]

In May 2015, only a month after key figures in the U.S. military publicly acknowledged the possibility that North Korea has perfected the miniaturization of a nuclear warhead for long-range delivery, the secretive country seems to have confirmed these claims with a series of announcements, including a “successful” submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test at […]

While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the […]

In response to public inquiries about the location of nuclear weapons, Department of Defense officials are normally supposed to respond: “It is U.S. policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of nuclear weapons at any general or specific location.” Remarkably, “This response must be provided even when such location is thought to […]

This week the Department of Energy posted the first declassification guidance for nuclear weapons-related information, known as the Tolman Committee reports, prepared in 1945-46. The Tolman reports were an early and influential effort to conceptualize the role of declassification of atomic energy information and the procedures for implementing it. Though the reports themselves were declassified in the […]

By Hans M. Kristensen The number of U.S. strategic warheads counted as “deployed” under the New START Treaty has dropped below the treaty’s limit of 1,550 warheads for the first time since the treaty entered into force in February 2011 – a reduction of 263 warheads over four and a half years. Russia, by contrast, […]

While China has received growing attention for modernizing and expanding its strategic offensive nuclear forces over the last ten years, little attention has been paid to Chinese activities in testing and developing ballistic missile defenses (BMD). Motivated to understand the strategic implications of this testing and to learn Chinese views, Adjunct Senior Fellow and Professor, […]