WMD Archive

As the International Atomic Energy Agency held its Board of Governors meeting and annual General Conference over the past two weeks, the members of this often-overlooked United Nations body found themselves thrust again into the public limelight and burdened with a rapidly expanding agenda. Governments jousted over how to craft new approaches to deal with the aftermath of the nuclear accident at Fukushima, divvy up the agency’s budget and deal with controversial nuclear programs in the Middle East. The debates took place among a membership bitterly divided between those states with advanced nuclear capabilities and those that lack them, divisions […]

There is broad bipartisan agreement that few national security issues are as critical as how to deal with America’s crippling debt. Getting America’s fiscal house in order will require difficult budgetary choices. This means that we need to make smart decisions about what is most needed to safeguard U.S. national security in the 21st century. A close look at the Pentagon budget reveals numerous programs that are more suitable to defeating the Cold War-era Soviet Union than to addressing current security threats, such as weak and failing states, cyberattacks and nuclear terrorism. A particularly egregious example is the budget for […]

Leaders of China’s Communist Party are indicating that they seek a return to the “six party” talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, which came to a standstill more than two years ago.

Eight years after Moammar Gadhafi gave up his mail-order nuclear weapons program and chemical munitions in exchange for détente with the West, he has been chased from power by a ragtag rebel army backed by Western airpower. Chances are that Gadhafi regrets his decision to forgo his WMD programs. If he had been armed with nuclear or chemical weapons, NATO might not have intervened when he threatened to massacre his own people. While Gadhafi’s fall is good news, the end of the eccentric colonel’s dictatorship now heightens the challenge of getting the Irans and North Koreas of the world to […]

Iran’s offer this week to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors “full supervision” of its nuclear activities appeared, initially at least, to represent a softening of what for the past two years has been the country’s obstructionist posture toward the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency. However, according to James M. Acton, a senior associate with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the offer was actually made as part of a strategy designed to prevent the IAEA from issuing a resolution condemning Iran’s failure to address questions about potentially militarized aspects of its nuclear program. “The fundamental […]