Editor's Note

There are few countries that Americans—and even American diplomats—understand less than North Korea. Yet, there also are few regimes whose policies and behaviors are as important to U.S. and regional security as that of Kim Jong Il. If either President George W. Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hopes to end the war of words with Pyongyang and strike a deal to end its nuclear weapons program, they will need to fill this knowledge gap, writes C. Kenneth Quinones in this month’s cover story.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, even if the fighting subsides, U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians will continue to face danger from massive amounts of surplus ammunition and unexploded ordnance left in the wake of last year’s U.S.-led invasion. Last fall, diplomats reached agreement on a protocol to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons to govern the cleanup of explosive remnants of war. Ambassador Chris Sanders of the Netherlands, the leader of those talks, lays out the history of those negotiations and the importance of their ultimate product.

Bush, Kerry, and the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks have termed nuclear terrorism the gravest threat to the United States. Charles Ferguson, the co-author of a new book on the subject, explains how neither presidential candidate has a solid enough plan to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on the crucial ingredient for such an attack: highly enriched uranium.

Ending global production of HEU is one of the twin goals of longstanding proposals for a fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT). An FMCT would also end production of plutonium, the other material that can fuel a nuclear weapon. In the news section, Wade Boese reports on the Bush administration’s new policy on the FMCT, while in his “Focus,” ACA Executive Director Daryl G. Kimball offers his take on Bush’s announcement.

India and Pakistan would be two of the key players in any FMCT negotiations. In our book review this issue, Michael Krepon reviews Strobe Talbott’s account of his negotiations with both countries, particularly India, following their nuclear tests in 1998.

Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration’s most dramatic foreign policy departure was its insistence on moving quickly to deploy a national missile defense and to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Bush withdrew from the treaty and in the meantime has spent tens of billions of dollars on missile defense. Now, that system is supposed to be ready for deployment, but as Boese points out in a news analysis, the system is still very much a work in progress.