“It will take all of us working together – government officials, and diplomats, academic experts, and scientists, activists, and organizers – to come up with new and innovative approaches to strengthen transparency and predictability, reduce risk, and forge the next generation of arms control agreements.”
Editor's Note
Several articles in this month’s issue demonstrate how the failure to carry out responsible arms control policies can have repercussions long after wars end or foreign policy priorities shift.
Nearly 40 years ago, U.S. planes dropped cluster munitions on Laos as part of the Vietnam War. Since then, as many as 100,000 people in that country and worldwide have been killed or maimed by submunitions that failed to explode initially and that spread over wide areas. In our cover story, Stephen D. Goose writes that negotiators crafting a treaty designed to at least limit these weapons should insist that they be banned altogether.
Rachel Stohl investigates how part of the U.S. strategy to counter terrorism may be sowing the seeds of future conflicts. Since the September 2001 attacks, she notes that the United States has stepped up military aid, training, and weapons sales to about two dozen countries considered front-line states in the “war on terrorism” or important regional players in this struggle. Stohl warns that just as some U.S. efforts to fight communism backfired and unintentionally helped establish groups such as al Qaeda, there may be many unfortunate consequences of current assistance efforts.
Little soothsaying is needed, however, to predict problems in U.S.-Russian strategic relations. A decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, those ties have deteriorated as a newly assertive Russia clashes with the Bush administration on a range of arms-related issues from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty to the future of START and to the Bush plan to construct strategic ballistic missile defenses in Europe. Can the world’s two largest nuclear powers head off future arms competition? Nancy Gallagher and John Steinbruner offer some hope, pointing to a recent survey that shows that if Russian and U.S. leaders took steps to resolve these disputes, public opinion would be quite supportive.
Our news section includes extensive coverage of recent congressional actions to push back on some administration nuclear initiatives. These include killing funding for a proposed new nuclear warhead and halting moves toward constructing a civilian spent fuel reprocessing facility. Our analysts also probe the test of a new Iranian missile and the effect that a recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program is having on debates on that subject at the United Nations.