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Steven Pifer

Steven Pifer, a retired career foreign service officer with the US Department of State and former US ambassador to Ukraine, is an affiliate of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. While at the US Department of State, he helped negotiate the Trilateral Statement and Budapest Memorandum in 1993-1994.


Articles by Steven Pifer

Question for the candidates: What will you do to avoid a nuclear arms race with Russia and China?

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Weapons
radiation warning sign in Nevada desert

The logic for US ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons

The US and Russia must re-assess their strategic relations in a world without New START

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Weapons

Three ways the US should respond to Russia’s suspension of New START

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Weapons

How the war in Ukraine hinders US-Russian nuclear arms control

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Weapons

Pushing back against Putin’s threat of nuclear use in Ukraine

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons
US President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris, Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk sign the Trilateral Agreement on transferring nuclear weapons from Ukraine to Russia and associated matters in Moscow, January 1994. Photo credit: Joseph P. Harahan, historian of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Clinton Presidential Library.

Why Putin’s betrayal of Ukraine could trigger nuclear proliferation

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Weapons, Opinion

Tacit rules to avoid a NATO-Russia war

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons, Opinion
Russian President Vladmir Putin. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: www.kremlin.ru, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

Setting the Biden-Putin summit bar low

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons, Opinion
Presidents Obama_and_Medvedev_sign New START in April 2010. Photo by: Kremlin.ru

Washington-Moscow nuclear verification: Tensions and solutions

By Steven Pifer | Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons

The Trump-Putin summit produces little. What can come next?

By Steven Pifer | Analysis, Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons, The INF Treaty and the Future of Arms Control