Editor's Note | Arms Control Association

It is not always obvious when arms control agreements have been successful. But as Peter Herby and Eve La Haye demonstrate in this month’s cover story, a decade-old treaty banning anti-personnel landmines has had an impact in the clearest way possible: reducing the number of people killed or injured by such weapons.

Unfortunately, attempts to negotiate another arms control treaty—a measure banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons—have met with far less success despite a half-century of rhetorical support from the international community. Canadian Ambassador Paul Meyer proposes some new ways in which a “fissban” could move forward. Meyer, who was closely involved with efforts to start negotiations on such a treaty in recent years, laments that prospects for success are slim, given the lack of political will among nuclear-weapon states.

Dramatic political developments in Pakistan have raised concerns about that country’s political stability and the security of its nuclear arsenal. Kenneth N. Luongo and Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Naeem Salik write that, during the past decade, Islamabad has taken a number of major steps to improve the security of its nuclear arsenal. They report that these measures include requiring the use of codes to arm nuclear warheads and that Pakistan’s employment of this important safety feature is often overlooked in the public dialogue.

As the 2008 party primaries and caucuses approach, Zachary M. Hosford analyzes where Democratic and Republican presidential candidates stand on arms control and nonproliferation issues. Other articles in our news section include Peter Crail’s examination of competing claims by North Korea and the United States over whether Pyongyang had a highly enriched uranium program as a means of building nuclear weapons, and Wade Boese’s look at the controversial issue of whether U.S. nuclear weapons remain on “hair trigger alert” long after the end of the Cold War.

The latter years of the Cold War are chronicled in Richard Rhodes’ “Arsenals of Folly,” which John Newhouse reviews this month. That work bemoans the frequent inability of Soviet and U.S. negotiators to strike deals that were clearly in both countries’ interest.

Of course, hindsight is often 20/20. Foresight is much rarer but is clearly a quality that Randall “Randy” Forsberg possessed in abundance. It was Randy who proposed and championed a nuclear freeze during the Cold War as a way of bringing a halt to the arms race. Sadly, Randy, an ACA board member, recently passed away. As our “In Memoriam” this month makes clear, she left a legacy of success that will go on.