Press Room

Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and his ministry's Director-General for Security Policy and the High North Steffen Kongstad garnered the highest number of votes in an online poll to determine the "2008 Arms Control Person of the Year." Nine other individuals and institutions were nominated by the Arms Control Association. (Continue)

President-elect Obama's national security team will have to grapple with a number of issues, including U.S. policy on certain types of conventional munitions that harm civilians. An early decision will be how to respond to the new Convention on Cluster Munitions, which 100 or more world leaders are expected to sign beginning tomorrow in Oslo. (Continue)

What is the Convention on Cluster Munitions?

Sharing many features with the 1997 Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel landmines and supported by many of the same governments, individuals and organizations that created that treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions calls for the clearance and destruction of virtually all existing cluster munitions. It also includes novel measures on victims' human rights and provisions for healthcare and social inclusion. (Continue)

President Obama will have to quickly make many tough foreign policy judgment calls. Among the most important is whether to proceed with the Bush administration's crash effort to install untested anti-missile interceptors in Poland by 2011 to deal with an as yet nonexistent Iranian long-range missile threat. (Continue)

Negotiations with North Korea to shut down its primary nuclear weapons program now stand at the precipice. Unless the United States and its allies can walk North Korea from the edge of fully restarting its bomb-producing efforts, the next president will assume office in the midst of another nuclear proliferation crisis. (Continue)

After a difficult three-year long process, the Senate this evening joined the House of Representatives in approving an unprecedented and imprudent nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India. The vote was 86-13. Earlier today, the Senate engaged in a brief but useful floor debate on the resolution of approval for the U.S.-Indian Agreement for Nuclear Cooperation and a common sense amendment offered Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) that would have: (Continue)

Arms Control Today, a leading journal on nonproliferation and global security, today released Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's answers to a dozen questions posed by the monthly magazine's editors on arms control and nonproliferation issues to both major party presidential candidates. (Continue)

In a letter sent to all 535 members of Congress, a group of independent nonproliferation experts, former U.S. ambassadors, faith groups, and international security and disarmament organizations urged the rejection of an unprecedented agreement for nuclear cooperation sent Sept. 10 to the Hill. (Continue)

Early this week, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal published articles in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice extolled the Bush administration’s record in limiting global nuclear dangers. Those articles apparently stemmed from an extended response that Rice delivered to a reporter’s question at a Sept. 7 press conference in Rabat, Morocco. Rice asserted that the administration’s record on nonproliferation and counterproliferation was “very strong” and “left this situation…in far better shape than we found it.” In making her case, Rice claimed success on a raft of issues, including progress on nuclear affairs with India, Iran, and North Korea. (Continue)

In an unprecedented move that will undermine the value of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the already beleaguered nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the NSG reluctantly agreed today in Vienna to exempt NPT hold-out India from its guidelines that require comprehensive international safeguards as a condition of nuclear trade. (Continue)

As U.S. and Indian officials race against the clock to win domestic and international approval for a controversial proposal to relax rules governing nuclear trade with India, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) has made public the Department of State’s January 2008 responses to more than 40 questions sent by the committee in October 2007 that were aimed at sorting out ambiguous and contradictory statements about the August 2007 U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement. (Continue)

Today, the Arms Control Association (ACA) obtained a copy of the revised U.S. proposal to exempt India from existing nuclear trade restrictions maintained by the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). The proposed rule change would allow India to acquire nuclear technology and material previously off limits to it because of India’s misuse of past nuclear imports designated for peaceful purposes to conduct a nuclear explosion in 1974 and refusal to allow full-scope international safeguards on its nuclear complex. (Continue)

The long-delayed Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report released today underscores once again that the president and his war cabinet selectively used portions of the flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Assessment (NIE) to justify the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The new report documents, beyond a doubt, that Bush and his team cherry-picked the flawed intelligence estimate, which was filled with caveats and qualifications about Iraq’s alleged nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs. (Continue)