Editor's Note

During this year’s presidential debates, President George W. Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) found something on which they could agree: nuclear proliferation is the top national security threat facing the United States. With the election over and a crucial international nonproliferation conference set for May, Arms Control Today is launching a series of articles on some of the crucial challenges faced by Bush and other world leaders as they attempt to strengthen the nonproliferation system.

The series begins with an interview with Ambassador Sérgio de Queiroz Duarte, the Brazilian diplomat who will chair the 2005 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. Duarte argues that progress at the upcoming meeting requires the nuclear-armed states and those without such weapons to fulfill the bargain at the heart of that 1968 treaty: a commitment by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China to pursue disarmament of their nuclear arsenals and a commitment by other countries to stay away from these weapons.

Maintaining confidence that the non-nuclear-weapons states will uphold their end of the bargain, however, has become more difficult with the spread of uranium-enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technology. That technology, generally viewed as unrestricted by the NPT, can be used either to provide fuel to nuclear power plants or provide the fissile material that is the critical building block for nuclear weapons.

This month, Jon B. Wolfsthal looks at various proposals for restricting or regulating access to such technologies and describes the political sensitivities surrounding this touchy subject. Tariq Rauf and Fiona Simpson provide an in-depth examination of the pluses and minuses of one of these options: multilateral ownership and use of such technologies.

The sensitivities inherent in such discussions are vividly demonstrated by the raging controversy over Iran’s attempts to acquire such enrichment technology. The Bush administration contends that Iran wants the technology to build nuclear weapons; Iran insists that it only wants the technology for peaceful purposes and that the NPT guarantees its right to have such facilities. Ambassador Robert Hunter calls on the Bush administration to stop trading accusations and engage in a broad dialogue with Tehran on security and other issues.

How the Bush administration will approach nonproliferation and arms control issues is the subject of an analysis in our news section. Substantial coverage is also devoted to negotiations between Iran and three European Union countries over Iran’s nuclear program.

Before we think of these problems as something new, Paul Boyer reminds us that our relationship with nuclear weapons has a long history. He uses the 40th anniversary of the release of the film “Dr. Strangelove” as a touchstone to examine our complex and even contradictory attitudes toward “the bomb.” As he notes, we have trouble making sense of a time when despite the ending of the Cold War, nuclear weapons remain the greatest threat to our national security. Over the next few months, as in the past 30 years, we hope to make this time a little less confusing.