In June 2025, Ukraine’s security services staged an audacious strike inside Russia. They infiltrated the country and hid short-range attack drones in cargo trucks near a slew of Russian air bases as far away as the Amur region on the border with China. Most of these bases were home to Russian strategic heavy bombers—aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Using Russia’s mobile phone network, Ukrainian operatives remotely launched the drones, successfully destroying at least ten of the bombers and damaging a total of 41 planes, including some used for nuclear command and control, according to Ukrainian assessments.

Known as Operation Spider’s Web, this assault was a remarkable gambit. The most significant aspect of the attack, however, was not its astonishing cost ratio—as one analyst put it, “a single drone costing just $500 destroyed a strategic bomber worth tens of millions of dollars”—or its ingenuity in hijacking Russian telecommunications, but the fact that it could happen at all. As part of its long-standing doctrine, Moscow had insisted that a conventional attack on its strategic assets could provoke a nuclear response. But that did not stop Kyiv. Ukraine was willing to go after Russia’s nuclear capabilities, and Russia was unable to prevent their destruction.

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Iran’s nuclear program remains a profound strategic challenge for both the United States and Israel, despite the consecutive joint aerial campaigns launched against it in June 2025 and February 2026. While these operations significantly degraded, temporarily, Tehran’s conventional military infrastructure, missile arsenals, and nuclear facilities, they failed to secure a medium to long-term resolution, due to Iran’s demonstrated capacity to rapidly reconstitute them.

In May 2026, the Trump administration attempted to resolve the impasse by negotiating an interim memorandum of understanding (MOU) intended to eventually lead to a permanent agreement with Iran. By early June 2026, the talks had stalled, with both sides reportedly hardening their positions. Iranian officials also conditioned any further progress on Israeli restraint in Lebanon and Gaza, effectively suspending the MOU track and turning Lebanon into the immediate diplomatic spoiler. At this stage, early June 2026, the conflict’s trajectory remains uncertain. Given the fluidity of events, the analysis offered here reflects the information available at the time of writing; a renewed outbreak of war cannot be ruled out, but at the same time, discussion of the MOU outline remains important.

Continue reading at hoover.org.

Civil wars, interstate wars, and terrorism receive a great deal of media and policy attention, for good reasons. By contrast, the major forms of interpersonal violence—homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children—generally have a much lower profile.

In Worse than War, Anke Hoeffler and James Fearon assemble and analyze the data on the global prevalence and costs of collective and interpersonal violence. They show that interpersonal violence is vastly more widespread and imposes far greater societal costs than collective violence. Wars tend to be concentrated in a small number of countries, and often relatively small areas within them. By contrast, almost all countries have rates of homicide and nonfatal assault, particularly of women and children, that far exceed the global average rates of death and injury in wars and terrorism.

Hoeffler and Fearon argue that high rates of interpersonal violence are not simply fixed by culture or other structural factors. Evidence from a host of program evaluations, natural experiments, and longer-term social movements make it clear that rates of homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children can be reduced if they are effectively targeted. Interventions that promote peace in civil war–torn countries are also possible, but the opportunities are few and increasingly far between. Drawing on ideas and methods from many fields—economics, political science, public health, psychology, sociology, and others—the authors show that money and policy efforts directed toward reducing interpersonal violence thus merit higher priority both within countries and by international donors.

Purchase the book at press.princeton.edu

February 2026 saw the end of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, the last nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. Without limitations on nuclear weapons, what comes next? Can scientists step in, as they did in years past, to help stop the risk of nuclear war?

There are now three major nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, and China—and six smaller nuclear-armed states (France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea). With the New START Treaty no longer in force, there is an opportunity for leaders of these nuclear states to create new treaties. US President Trump has said that he wants to do this and has plans to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping in 2026; he is also likely to meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the year. These encounters may set nuclear negotiations back on course. But as Trump and his administration are swept into new crises in Venezuela and Iran, nuclear arms control could remain unresolved and stagnate for the remainder of his term.

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President Donald Trump told the New York Times in January that he wants to negotiate a better treaty than New START, a message he repeated on February 5, the day the treaty went out of force. Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, added, “The president wants to have our nuclear experts work on a new improved and modernized treaty that can last long into the future. And that’s what the United States will continue to discuss with the Russians.”

All of this is welcome. Many have complained that New START does not limit nonstrategic nuclear weapons, nor does it limit so-called Russian exotic weapon systems. It was not designed to do so. The United States’ goal has always been to take up nonstrategic nuclear weapons in the next negotiations, as called for in the resolution of ratification of New START. As for the exotic systems, they appeared on the scene after New START entered into force, and of course, they must be accounted for in any new treaty.

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In 2022, China’s AI developer community faced dual shocks from the United States. In October, the U.S. government imposed unilateral export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and the most powerful chips for large language model (LLM) training. The following month, OpenAI brought state-of-the-art LLM technology to broad public attention with the launch of ChatGPT. Chinese commentators, noting the government launched a comprehensive plan for AI development five years earlier, asked why breakthroughs were not happening in China, and how Chinese developers could compete with the United States.

Continue reading at hai.stanford.edu.