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“For half a century, ACA has been providing the world … with advocacy, analysis, and awareness on some of the most critical topics of international peace and security, including on how to achieve our common, shared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.”

– Izumi Nakamitsu
UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs
June 2, 2022
Editor's Note
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Miles A. Pomper

Many states like arms control rules—in the abstract. But some find it much more difficult to support or adhere to such limits when restrictions require them to sacrifice concrete economic benefits or apparent security pillars. In this month’s issue of Arms Control Today, our authors look at four cases in which perceived national interests, or even national inertia, collide with international norms.

In the cover story, Fred McGoldrick, Harold Bengelsdorf, and Lawrence Scheinman analyze a July deal between the United States and India to resume civilian nuclear cooperation. The deal would alter long-standing U.S. and multilateral nonproliferation policy aimed at supporting the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by barring cooperation with states that do not allow comprehensive safeguards on their nuclear programs. Now, the Bush administration, eager to enlist India as a strategic counterweight to China, is seeking to carve out an exception. In return, India has agreed to some nonproliferation commitments but will continue to possess and be able to increase its nuclear weapons arsenal.

Both President George W. Bush and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei have advanced plans for limiting the global spread of uranium-enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies, which can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. These moves raised concerns in Brazil and Japan, two countries that recently have shown exemplary nonproliferation records (although Brazil had sought to build a nuclear weapon in the 1970s and 1980s). Sharon Squassoni and David Fite look at the controversy Brazil faces over the opening of its uranium-enrichment facility in Resende, and Shinichi Ogawa and Michael Schiffer discuss the dilemmas Japan confronts over its Rokassho plutonium reprocessing facility.

In our book review this month, Jack Mendelsohn looks at another country that has sought to sidestep international norms: the United States. He reviews three books that probe the Bush administration’s controversial nuclear weapons policy: rather than following through on treaty commitments to diminish the role of nuclear weapons in its security policy, it has been looking into new uses for them.

Such debates are far from academic. Differences over how states should handle their arms control responsibilities were apparent at a UN summit in September. Our news section examines those developments as well as the negotiations and deliberations concerning the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.