Editor's Note

<!-- #include virtual="/linked/head.inc" -->Miles A. Pomper

For more than two years, the United States has been pressing for the UN Security Council to confront Iran’s nuclear program. As our news section details this month, it looks like the Bush administration will finally get its wish. Still, that has left open the pressing question of what the Security Council should now do about the issue. In our cover story, Charles D. Ferguson and Ray Takeyh analyze the dynamics within Iran and offer some concrete suggestions for ending this crisis.

With Iran, the international community has been mobilized to action in part by the increasingly provocative behavior of Tehran. By contrast, with India, the United States may potentially be fomenting new problems, as Richard Speier recounts in another feature article. Pointing to a recent agreement between the United States and India to deepen space-related ties, Speier says such cooperation may inadvertently contribute to India developing an ICBM, shaking up international relations, and even potentially endangering the United States.

Similarly, Sonia Ben Ourgrham-Gormley says that U.S. officials have not paid sufficient attention or correctly structured assistance programs to confront the proliferation danger posed by the former Soviet anti-plague system. She illuminates how deeply this ostensibly peaceful program was involved in making biological weapons for the former Soviet Union. She also discusses the dangers that materials and expertise from anti-plague facilities still pose to international security.

The Soviet Union, as well as a few other countries, also had a substantial chemical weapons arsenal. In our book review this month, Michael Moodie examines Jonathan Tucker’s War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare From World War I to Al Qaeda, which chronicles these and other chapters in the history of these dangerous arms.

In addition to detailing the drivers of the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program, our news section in this month’s expanded issue includes coverage ranging from the new nuclear policy recently outlined by French President Jacques Chirac to an in-depth look at President George W. Bush’s fiscal year 2007 budget request to Congress.

 

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