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Editor's Note
With oil prices high and concerns about global warming on the rise, more than a dozen countries in the Middle East have expressed an interest in pursuing nuclear energy. But recent U.S. claims about an alleged Syrian nuclear facility attacked by the Israeli Air Force illustrate one reason why these energy plans may be dangerous. The Middle East is the only region where countries have attacked and destroyed nuclear reactors.
Fortunately, none of these attacks to date has led to the deadly release of radiation from the targeted facilities. Yet, as Bennett Ramberg warns in this month's issue, that would not likely be the case if regional rivals or terrorists were able to mount a successful attack on Israel's Dimona reactor, which produces plutonium and tritium for its suspected nuclear weapons program. Ramberg urges Israel to shut down the reactor and use the closure as an opportunity to win regional support for efforts to prevent nuclear or radiological attacks.
One of the more hopeful trends in recent years has been the growing support for nuclear disarmament among the nuclear-weapon states and across the political spectrum. If such efforts are to take root, however, states need to have confidence that agreements to dismantle nuclear weapons can be accurately verified. This month's issue includes two articles that focus on this question. Andreas Persbo and Marius Bjørningstad, participants in a Norwegian-British research project on the subject, take a broad look at the issues that designers of a nuclear weapons disarmament verification regime have to tackle. Thomas E. Shea recounts the experience of the Trilateral Initiative, which was a six-year U.S.-Russian-IAEA initiative to address many of these questions.
The European Union has been seeking to become a bigger player on nonproliferation and disarmament issues. In another feature article, Oliver Meier, Arms Control Today's international correspondent, takes stock of the limited success EU efforts have had to date and examines the possibility for the union to play a larger role in the future.
In addition to a news analysis on Middle Eastern nuclear energy issues, Peter Crail reports on the Bush administration's disclosures about the attack on the Syrian facility and the responses to those claims from Congress and abroad. Wade Boese takes a look at decisions on missile defense made at a NATO summit in Bucharest and the final summit between Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Our "Looking Back" this month reviews events surrounding the 1998 Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests that brought those programs into the open and spurred a strategic arms race in South Asia. In it, Michael Krepon recounts how a few small decisions in negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty helped spur those tests, as well as scuttled hopes that the treaty itself would quickly enter into force.