Editor's Note

Miles A. Pomper

It is perhaps the scenario most dreaded by the American public and U.S. national security experts: Organized crime gangs take advantage of poorly secured former Soviet nuclear materials and smuggle a bomb’s worth of nuclear material across unguarded borders. They pass the material to terrorists, who eventually detonate such a weapon in the United States or against U.S. interests.

Fortunately, such a scenario has yet to play out in real life. Indeed, as Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley notes in this month’s cover story, available data indicates that, despite post-September 11 fears, a nexus among terrorists, organized crime, and dangerous weapons trafficking has not formed in the former Soviet Union. Still, she cautions that more needs to be done to keep such nightmares from becoming reality.

Likewise, Sidney Niemayer and David K. Smith say that, by failing to keep better track of these incidents and relevant materials, governments in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere are failing to fully tap a vital resource. Follow-on investigations and information sharing, they say, could help determine the origin of nuclear or radiological materials and point to the perpetrators of such crimes.

Americans may fear a nuclear attack by terrorists, but some non-nuclear-weapon states fear such an attack from the United States and other nuclear weapons possessors. To assuage their concern, they have pushed the nuclear-weapon states to provide assurances that they will not use nuclear arms against states without them. But as George Bunn and Jean du Preez argue in another article, the Bush administration has watered down the already limited negative security assurances provided by previous U.S. administrations. They urge the next U.S. president to solidify these commitments.

Our news section this month looks at Russia’s missile defense offer, a U.S. offer on cluster munitions, congressional opposition to a new nuclear warhead, and the release of a new International Atomic Energy Agency report on international cooperation to limit the dangers of nuclear fuel-cycle facilities.

How to cope with the potential dangers caused by the global spread of nuclear fuel-cycle technology is one of the themes of the book Atoms for Peace: A Future After 50 Years?, edited by Joseph Pilat. Ambassador Norman A. Wulf says the book demonstrates that supply-side approaches to controlling nuclear proliferation are losing effectiveness and more efforts need to be made to dampen the motivations for new states to acquire such weapons.

Also, a printer error led to some words being dropped from the introduction to the cover story in the print edition of our June issue. As a service to our readers, we have reprinted the article in full on page 51 of the July/August print edition of Arms Control Today.