Past Projects

In partnership with King’s College London, the ELN led an innovative project funded by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) to identify potential opportunities and challenges for the P5 Process in advance of the NPT Review Conference.

The key aims of the project were:

1. To anticipate opportunities and challenges for the P5 Process through Track 1.5 and Track 2 workshops prior to the February 2020 P5 meeting in London and 2020 NPT RevCon;
2. To promote transparency on nuclear policy between the P5 states and civil society actors;
3. To develop an inclusive, civil society process parallel to official P5 meetings;
4. To identify specific opportunities for P5 cooperation in key policy areas; and
5. To promote NPT objectives and positive atmospherics amongst the P5 and wider international community leading to the 2020 RevCon.

Find our more about the project and its impact here.

Recognising the accentuating and accelerating great power trends towards unilateralism and confrontation. The ELN launched three simultaneous member-led initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic collectively known as ‘Go Big’:

1. Extension of NEW START: The ELN strategised how Europeans can make a strong case to both Washington and Moscow to extend the New START Treaty for the benefit of global stability in a highly uncertain time.
2. Nuclear risk reduction: The ELN worked to secure the establishment of a senior-level working group to outline a programme for risk reduction. This was intended to enable the P5 to increase strategic stability in international politics while satisfying the non-nuclear-weapon states that the P5 are taking their treaty obligations seriously.
3. NATO-Russia: The ELN identified a realistic path toward de-escalation between NATO and Russia to reduce risks of military incidents and establish ways of communication leading to greater transparency. As reported in The Times, the ELN published a list of recommendations signed by 145 people from 20 countries, including 48 ELN network members, calling on leaders in the US, Russia and Europe to demonstrate the political will necessary to take a number of urgent actions in order to reduce the risks of military conflict.

Supported by the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC), this ELN project examined the potential impact of AI-enabled decision-making tools on strategic decision-making, particularly in crisis scenarios, within the context of the nuclear domain. This exploration encompasses an analysis of the benefits and challenges presented by AI in this realm.

The project’s core objective was to evaluate AI-associated risks, with a specific emphasis on the incorporation of AI-enabled tools into nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems, and how it influences the process of nuclear decision-making. By reviewing open-source literature from British, Chinese, French, and Russian sources, this project accumulated with a report on P5 perspectives and established the basis for a general purpose risk assessment framework

The Iran Network supported work between 2018-2023 to protect the JCPOA between the P5+1 and Iran, and thereby to implement UN Resolution 2231. This included working with partners across Europe and in Washington and engaging the ELN’s senior network of political, military and diplomatic figures. Our focus was to ensure that Europe plays the fullest and most effective role possible by helping E3 governments and Brussels to better understand and address key challenges in sustaining what remained of the nuclear agreement and productively engage on peripheral issues. Since 2023 we have moved on to a new phase of Iran work looking more broadly at the prospects for nuclear diplomacy in a changing global and regional political context. Full information can be found here.

Information on our current project looking at future nuclear diplomacy with Iran can be found here.