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Carnegie Proliferation News Archive
Those who favor a diplomatic solution to the present crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions should nevertheless realize that to ignore Iran’s defiance of UN Security Council resolutions is to tacitly support it, and doing so weakens the credibility of the non-proliferation regime and, in the end, increases the risk of nuclear proliferation, tensions, and violence in the region and beyond.
Reading William Langewiesche's new book is like going to a concert and discovering that your favorite rock star is having an off night. The sublime talent rings through in a few electric riffs. The voice registers the deep truth of heavy experience in two or three places. But the show doesn't hold together from start to finish.
Some issues surrounding the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty deserve new attention. The future of verification and transparency is especially fertile ground and demands attention, given the Bush administration’s preference to see START and its verification protocol go out of force at the end of 2009.
Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon was in Washington last week to save the troubled U.S.-India nuclear deal. U.S. negotiators should ensure that the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement meets the letter and spirit of that law. Anything Less should be rejected by Congress.
George Perkovich says there is no question that Iran has not complied yet with the IAEA investigation into its nuclear activities despite its claims to the contrary. He predicts that if pressure from the UN Security Council and others persists, in time a “core” group in Iran may agree to suspend uranium enrichment, opening the door to possible agreements across the board on a number of issues.
Iran is becoming more isolated because of its refusal to take steps to build international confidence that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
(The following op-ed by Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, first appeared in Defense News on March 5, 2007.)
Following the end of U.S. nuclear testing a decade and a half ago, some scientists and policy-makers worried that the reliability of U.S. nuclear warheads could diminish as their plutonium cores age. They claimed it would take a decade or more to see if the nation’s weapon laboratories could maintain the existing stockpile of well-tested but aging weapons without further nuclear blasts.
Such concerns led many senators to withhold their support for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999.
Time has addressed the skeptics’ concerns. For more than a decade, a multibillion-dollar Stockpile Stewardship program has successfully maintained the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal in the absence of testing. As the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. military strategy has diminished, there has been no need to test new types of nukes.
But now, the Bush administration is asking Congress to fund an ambitious effort to build new replacement warheads, which it claims is needed to avoid plutonium aging problems that could reduce weapon reliability. (Read More)