event

America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation

Wed. May 23rd, 2001

Chair:
Joseph Cirincione: Director, Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project

Henry Sokolski discussed his new book, Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (Praeger: 2001), a comprehensive history of nonproliferation. In his presentation Henry Sokolski highlighted five primary non-proliferation efforts that Best of Intentions addresses - the Baruch Plan, the Atoms for Peace Program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, proliferation technology control regimes, and counterproliferation. He discussed his book's argument that "to the extent [the efforts] characterized the strategic threat properly, they produced nonproliferation measures that were sound. To the extent they did not, they encouraged measures that were impractical or that actually compounded the proliferation threats they was supposed to reduce."

In Best of Intentions the author contends that "to presume that there is some military-technical solution to proliferation is to misunderstand the threat it presents. " Instead, Best of Intentions provocatively recommends action "toward a nonmilitary campaign." Mr. Sokolski also addressed the argument that the non-proliferation community is faced with the challenge "at a minimum to contain the proliferation threats in the zones of turmoil, … [which] may be the surest way to get existing weapons states to reduce or eliminate their strategic weapons arsenal."

Mr. Sokolski served under Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney from l989 to early l993. He has also worked under Andrew Marshall in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. In 1999, he received a U.S. Senate appointment to the U.S. Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Order Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation from Amazon.com

To learn more, visit the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

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