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The weakest link in the nonproliferation regime today is the performance of the international community in responding to cases of non-compliance, and the burden falls largely on the IAEA Board of Governors and the UN Security Council.
The current stalemate of the IAEA's investigation of undeclared nuclear activities in Syria is the responsibility of the Syrian government, which buried the remains of its covert nuclear reactor in 2008 and now seeks to bury the IAEA investigation.
By exempting India from nonproliferation rules, all 45 members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group are complicit in the U.S.-India nuclear deal, and they should all feel compelled to cooperate to ensure that the India deal does not turn into a dangerous precedent.
Improving the reliability of nuclear fuel supplies is best achieved by giving priority to fuel leasing contracts coupled with long-term generic export licenses, and last resort multilateral fuel supply arrangements.
Nuclear-armed states and non-nuclear-weapon states alike can and should work together in the short term to overcome the technical challenges of verifying disarmament and help advance the longer-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons.
The United States has not convinced allies of its resolve to make extended deterrence credible. A new, effective strategy of communicating U.S. resolve must disentangle the concepts of capabilities and resolve while engaging more closely with allies.
International threats and sanctions unify Iranians behind an unloved regime while inducements threaten the regime's foundations, which are built on hostility to the world, embattlement, and "resistance."
Nuclear power is not without risks, both from nuclear waste and the possible proliferation of nuclear fuel for weapons, and its cost and build-out time make it a partial solution, at best, to climate change.
The best way to begin accounting for and reducing obsolete U.S. and Russian battlefield nukes is to finalize the new START agreement and, as the Obama administration has suggested, begin a new and more comprehensive round of talks early next year to arrive at limits on all types of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces.
As director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency for 12 years, Mohamed ElBaradei has significantly raised the profile of the agency, but he has also regularly stepped beyond his mandate. His successor, Yukiya Amano can learn from ElBaradei's experience.