Ploughshares Fund Blog

It’s easy to miss amid the escalation of sanctions and nuclear bravado, but EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Tehran’s lead negotiator Saeed Jalili will meet on May 15 in Istanbul to follow up on last months talks between the P5+1 and Iran. The last round of multilateral talks ended inconclusively, and it has taken a little over a month to get even a one-on-one meeting on the calendar. While no date has been set for a new round of talks with representatives from all seven countries at the table, the upcoming meeting between Ashton and Jalili provides an opportunity to begin planning for how to make negotiations more productive than previous attempts. Getting on a road more promising than the current intermittent exchanges will require a few key steps: Read more »

When I first heard of the Boston bombings, my immediate reaction was gratitude that the bombs weren't radioactive. Working at Ploughshares Fund, it's hard not to be aware of the very real possibility that radioactive materials could easily be part of any terrorist attack on the U.S. – domestic or foreign – and to think of how much worse that would be than the already horrible consequences of the type of IEDs used at Boston's marathon.  Read more »

Last week’s announcement that the U.S.-South Korea nuclear cooperation agreement would be extended for two additional years dashes the hopes of those South Korean hawks who seek to make their country a nuclear weapons state, at least for the time being. Indeed, the prospect of a nuclear-armed South Korea was so alarming to some that The New York Times ten days earlier published an editorial that came out against a nuclear cooperation agreement that would allow South Korea to enrich uranium and reprocess U.S.-sourced fuel rods to separate plutonium. For many readers, this might have caused a double take when North Korea has been leading the headlines as the region’s nuclear problem. What’s going on? Read more »

Recently, The Iran Project released its much anticipated third report entitled “Strategic Options for Iran: Balancing Pressure with Diplomacy.” As a group of highly respected national security experts and former U.S. government officials, it provides thoughtful analysis on the complex U.S.-Iran relationship. This report offers concrete, strategic policy recommendations that call for the administration to invest as much energy in negotiations with Iran as it has in putting pressure on the Iranian government. Read more »